rostrum from which to preach life against deadening, benumbing Judaism—the Church persecuted in the actors the agents of Hellenism, and this persecution often followed the poets who derived their inspiration only from Apollo, and assured a refuge to the proscribed heathen gods in the land of poetry.
Or was there perhaps some spite in the game? The most intolerable foes of the oppressed Church, during the first two centuries, were the players, and the Acta Sanctorum often tell how these "infamous actors" often devoted themselves for the amusement of the heathen mob to mocking the manner of life and mysteries of the Nazarenes. Or was it a mutual jealousy which begot such bitter enmity between the servants of the spiritual and the worldly word?
Next to ascetic, religious zeal was the republican fanaticism which inspired the Puritans in their hatred for the old English stage, in which not only heathenism and heathenish tastes, but also royalism and nobility were exalted. I have shown in another place[1] how much resemblance there was in this respect between the Puritans of those days and the Republicans of ours. May Apollo and the eternal Muses protect us from the rule of the latter!
In the whirlpool of the priestly and political
- ↑ In discussing the characters in Julius Cæsar in the following pages.—Note by H. Heine.
