onfined to a small minority of thinkers, though these included some
who were far from being puritans. John Dennis was not thought to have
the worst of the controversy, when he defended the stage against the
attack of an opponent far above him in stature--the great mystic William
Law[235]--and to John Wesley himself it seemed that "a great deal more
might be said in defence of seeing a serious tragedy" than of taking
part in the amusements of bear-baiting and cock-fighting. On the other
hand, the demands of the stage and those of its patrons and of the
public of the "Augustan" age, and of that which succeeded it, were, in
general, fast bound by the trammels of a taste with which a revival of
the poetic drama long remained irreconcilable. There is every reason to
conclude that the art of acting progressed in the same direction of
artificiality, and became stereotyped in forms corresponding to the
"chant" which represented tragic declamation in a series of actors
ending with Quin and Macklin. In the latter must be recognized features
of a precursor, but it was reserved to the genius of Garrick, whose
theatrical career extended from 1741 to 1776, to open a new era in his
art. His unparalleled success was due in the first instance to his
incomparable natural gifts; yet these were indisputably enhanced by a
careful and continued literary training, and ennobled by a purpose
which prompted him to essay the noblest, as he was capable of performing
the most various, range of English theatrical characters. By devoting
himself as actor and manager with special zeal to the production of
Shakespeare, Garrick permanently popularized on the national stage the
greatest creations of English drama, and indirectly helped to seal the
doom of what survived of the tendency to maintain in the most ambitious
walks of dramatic literature the nerveless traditions of the
pseudo-classical school. A generation of celebrated actors and
actresses, many of whom live for us in the drastic epigrams of
Churchill's _Rosciad_ (1761), were his helpmates or his rivals; but
their fame has paled, while his is destined to endure as that of one of
the typical masters of his art.

Decline of tragedy.

The contrast between the tragedy of the 18th century and those plays of
Shakespeare and one or two other Elizabethans which already before
Garrick were known to the English stage, was weakened by the mutilated
form in which the old masterpieces generally, if not