to the Roundheads, and were so far from being disposed to
purchase union by concession that they objected to concession chiefly
because it tended to produce union.

Such feelings, though blamable, were natural, and not wholly
inexcusable. The Puritans had undoubtedly, in the day of their power,
given cruel provocation. They ought to have learned, if from nothing
else, yet from their own discontents, from their own struggles, from
their own victory, from the fall of that proud hierarchy by which they
had been so heavily oppressed, that, in England, and in the seventeenth
century, it was not in the power of the civil magistrate to drill the
minds of men into conformity with his own system of theology. They
proved, however, as intolerant and as meddling as ever Laud had been.
They interdicted under heavy penalties the use of the Book of Common
Prayer, not only in churches, but even in private houses. It was a
crime in a child to read by the bedside of a sick parent one of those
beautiful collects which had soothed the griefs of forty generations
of Christians. Severe punishments were denounced against such as
should presume to blame the Calvinistic mode of worship. Clergymen of
respectable character were not only ejected from their benefices by
thousands, but were frequently exposed to the outrages of a fanatical
rabble. Churches and sepulchres, fine works of art and curious remains
of antiquity, were brutally defaced. The Parliament resolved that all
pictures in the royal collection which contained representations of
Jesus or of the Virgin Mother should be burned. Sculpture fared as
ill as painting. Nymphs and Graces, the work of Ionian chisels, were
delivered over to Puritan stonemasons to be made decent. Against the
lighter vices the ruling faction waged war with a zeal little tempered
by humanity or by common sense. Sharp laws were passed against betting.
It was enacted that adultery should be punished with death. The illicit
intercourse of the sexes, even where neither violence nor seduction was
imputed, where no public scandal was given, where no conjugal right was
violated, was made a misdemeanour. Public amusements, from the masques
which were exhibited at the mansions of the great down to the wrestling
matches and grinning matches on village greens, were vigorously
attacked. One ordinance directed that all the Maypoles in England should
forthwith be hewn down. Another proscribed all theatrical diversions.
The pla