f to see herself so
outdone, but to-morrow she begins to learn to dance for a month or two. So
to prayers and to bed. Will being gone, with my leave, to his father's this
day for a day or two, to take physique these holydays.

23d. St. George's day and Coronacion, the King and Court being at Windsor,
at the installing of the King of Denmarke by proxy and the Duke of
Monmouth.... Spent the evening with my father. At cards till late, and
being at supper, my boy being sent for some mustard to a neat's tongue, the
rogue staid half an houre in the streets, it seems at a bonfire, at which I
was very angry, and resolve to beat him to-morrow.

24th. Up betimes, and with my salt eele went down into the parler and there
got my boy and did beat him till I was fain to take breath two or three
times, yet for all I am afeard it will make the boy never the better, he is
grown so hardened in his tricks, which I am sorry for, he being capable of
making a brave man, and is a boy that I and my wife love very well.

SUMMARY OF THE RESTORATION PERIOD. The chief thing to note in England
during the Restoration is the tremendous social reaction from the
restraints of Puritanism, which suggests the wide swing of a pendulum from
one extreme to the other. For a generation many natural pleasures had been
suppressed; now the theaters were reopened, bull and bear baiting revived,
and sports, music, dancing,--a wild delight in the pleasures and vanities
of this world replaced that absorption in "other-worldliness" which
characterized the extreme of Puritanism.

In literature the change is no less marked. From the Elizabethan drama
playwrights turned to coarse, evil scenes, which presently disgusted the
people and were driven from the stage. From romance, writers turned to
realism; from Italian influence with its exuberance of imagination they
turned to France, and learned to repress the emotions, to follow the head
rather than the heart, and to write in a clear, concise, formal style,
according to set rules. Poets turned from the noble blank verse of
Shakespeare and Milton, from the variety and melody which had characterized
English poetry since Chaucer's day, to the monotonous heroic couplet with
its mechanical perfection.

The greatest writer of the age is John Dryden, who established the heroic
couplet as the prevailing verse form in English poetry, and who developed a
new and serviceable prose style suited to the practical needs of the age.