t
of excess is disease, and for almost an entire generation following the
Restoration, in 1660, England lay sick of a fever. Socially, politically,
morally, London suggests an Italian city in the days of the Medici; and its
literature, especially its drama, often seems more like the delirium of
illness than the expression of a healthy mind. But even a fever has its
advantages. Whatever impurity is in the blood "is burnt and purged away,"
and a man rises from fever with a new strength and a new idea of the value
of life, like King Hezekiah, who after his sickness and fear of death
resolved to "go softly" all his days. The Restoration was the great crisis
in English history; and that England lived through it was due solely to the
strength and excellence of that Puritanism which she thought she had flung
to the winds when she welcomed back a vicious monarch at Dover. The chief
lesson of the Restoration was this,--that it showed by awful contrast the
necessity of truth and honesty, and of a strong government of free men, for
which the Puritan had stood like a rock in every hour of his rugged
history. Through fever, England came slowly back to health; through gross
corruption in society and in the state England learned that her people were
at heart sober, sincere, religious folk, and that their character was
naturally too strong to follow after pleasure and be satisfied. So
Puritanism suddenly gained all that it had struggled for, and gained it
even in the hour when all seemed lost, when Milton in his sorrow
unconsciously portrayed the government of Charles and his Cabal in that
tremendous scene of the council of the infernal peers in Pandemonium,
plotting the ruin of the world.

Of the king and his followers it is difficult to write temperately. Most of
the dramatic literature of the time is atrocious, and we can understand it
only as we remember the character of the court and society for which it was
written. Unspeakably vile in his private life, the king had no redeeming
patriotism, no sense of responsibility to his country for even his public
acts. He gave high offices to blackguards, stole from the exchequer like a
common thief, played off Catholics and Protestants against each other,
disregarding his pledges to both alike, broke his solemn treaty with the
Dutch and with his own ministers, and betrayed his country for French money
to spend on his own pleasures. It is useless to paint the dishonor of a
court which followe