Its professed purpose was to decry stage-plays, comedies, interludes, music, dancing; but the author likewise took occasion to declaim against hunting, public festivals, Christmas-keeping, bonfires, and may-poles.

His zeal against all these levities, he says, was first moved by observing that plays sold better than the choicest sermons, and that they were frequently printed on finer paper than the Bible itself.

Besides, that the players were often Papists, and desperately wicked; the play-houses, he affirms, are Satan's chapels; the play-haunters little better than incarnate devils; and so many steps in a dance, so many paces to hell.

The chief crime of Nero, he represents to have been his frequenting and acting of plays; and those who nobly conspired his death, were principally moved to it, as he affirms, by their indignation at that enormity.

The rest of his thousand pages is of a like strain.