again on the fall of
the Commonwealth it only reflected the general vice of the day. The
Comedy of the Restoration borrowed everything from the contemporary
Comedy of France save the poetry, the delicacy, and good taste which
there veiled its grossness. Seduction, intrigue, brutality, cynicism,
debauchery, found fitting expression on the English stage in dialogue of
a studied and deliberate foulness, which even its wit fails to redeem
from disgust. Wycherly, the popular playwright of the time, remains the
most brutal among all dramatists; and nothing gives so damning an
impression of his day as the fact that he found actors to repeat his
words and audiences to applaud them. Men such as Wycherly gave Milton
models for the Belial of his great poem, "than whom a spirit more lewd
fell not from heaven, or more gross to love vice for itself." The
dramatist piques himself on the frankness and "plain dealing" which
painted the world as he saw it, a world of brawls and assignations, of
orgies at Vauxhall and fights with the watch, of lies and
_doubles-ententes_, of knaves and dupes, of men who sold their
daughters, and women who cheated their husbands. But the cynicism of
Wycherly was no greater than that of the men about him; and in mere love
of what was vile, in contempt of virtue and disbelief in purity or
honesty, the king himself stood ahead of any of his subjects.

[Sidenote: The New Rationalism.]

It is easy however to exaggerate the extent of this reaction. So far as
we can judge from the memoirs of the time its more violent forms were
practically confined to the capital and the court. The mass of
Englishmen were satisfied with getting back their Maypoles and
mince-pies; and a large part of the people remained Puritan in life and
belief though they threw aside many of the outer characteristics of
Puritanism. Nor was the revolution in feeling as sudden as it seemed.
Even if the political strength of Puritanism had remained unbroken its
social influence must soon have ceased. The young Englishmen who grew up
in the midst of civil war knew nothing of the bitter tyranny which gave
its zeal and fire to the religion of their fathers. From the social and
religious anarchy around them, from the endless controversies and
discussions of the time, they drank in the spirit of scepticism, of
doubt, of free inquiry. If religious enthusiasm had broken the spell of
ecclesiastical tradition its own extravagance broke the spell of
relig