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clergyman, had (in 1719) collected 7000 'immoral sentiments from British dramatists' to prove the same point, and William Law, Byrom's great teacher, had demonstrated in a treatise the absolute unlawfulness of stage entertainments (1726), and had elsewhere declared that 'the playhouse was as certainly the house of the devil as the church was the house of God.' Byrom was, perhaps, one of those people who could not be too hard even upon the 'puir de'il.' He was, at least, willing to try the effect of good-humoured raillery on the evil one before proceeding to stronger measures. When one of his friends complains of Law's severity in this matter, Byrom is evidently puzzled. His reverence for Law struggles with a sense that the oracle was rather harsh. But in other matters Byrom's loyalty was boundless. Byrom's interest in various representatives of the religious speculations of the time is shown constantly in his diaries. He meets William Whiston, the successor to Newton's professorship, who had been deprived of his place as a heretic, and went about in all societies (he appears in the well-known picture of Tunbridge Wells with Richardson, Chesterfield, and the rest) trying to propagate what he took to be primitive