reflected back upon their mimetic Monstrosities as it has viciously
(hitherto) vitiated with its vile Vanities her Votarists.' A strange
title, but bearing the impress of those absurdities with which the
title-pages of that pamphlet-spawning age abounded. The work bears date
1617. It preceded the 'Histriomastix' by fifteen years; and as it went
before it in time, so it comes not far short of it in virulence. It is
amusing to find an ancestor of Listen's thus bespattering the players at
the commencement of the seventeenth century:--

"'Thinketh He,' (the actor,) 'with his costive countenances, to
wry a sorrowing soul out of her anguish, or by defacing the divine
denotement of destinate dignity (daignely described in the face
humane and no other) to reinstamp the Paradice-plotted similitude
with a novel and naughty approximation (not in the first
intention) to those abhorred and ugly God-forbidden
correspondences, with flouting Apes' jeering gibberings, and
Babion babbling-like, to hoot out of countenance all modest
measure, as if our sins were not sufficing to stoop our backs
without He wresting and crooking his members to mistimed mirth
(rather malice) in deformed fashion, leering when he should learn,
prating for praying, goggling his eyes, (better upturned for
grace,) whereas in Paradice (if we can go thus high for His
profession) that devilish Serpent appeareth his undoubted
Predecessor, first induing a mask like some roguish roistering
Roscius (I spit at them all) to beguile with Stage shows the
gaping Woman, whose Sex hath still chiefly upheld these Mysteries,
and are voiced to be the chief Stage-haunters, where, as I am
told, the custom is commonly to mumble (between acts) apples, not
ambiguously derived from that pernicious Pippin, (worse in effect
than the Apples of Discord,) whereas sometimes the hissing sounds
of displeasure, as I hear, do lively reintonate that
snake-taking-leave, and diabolical goings off, in Paradice.'

"The Puritanic effervescence of the early Presbyterians appears to have
abated with time, and the opinions of the more immediate ancestors of
our subject to have subsided at length into a strain of moderate
Calvinism. Still a tincture of the old leaven was to be expected among
the posterity of A.L.

"Our hero was the only son of Habakkuk Liston, settled as an anabaptist
minister upon the patrimon