pse ere it can be replaced
by a cleaner, healthier spirit.

Charles has surely had much to answer for at the bar of public opinion
(a bar for which he evidently felt a profound contempt), and the evil
influence which he and his Court exerted on the drama supplies one of
the greatest blots on his moral 'scutcheon. Augustus William Schlegel,
that foreigner who studied the literature of the English stage as few
Britons have ever done, well pointed out that while the Puritans had
brought Republican principles and religious zeal into public odium,
this light-hearted monarch seemed expressly born to dispel all respect
for the kingly dignity. "England was inundated with the foreign
follies and vices in his train. The Court set the fashion of the most
undisguised immorality, and this example was the more extensively
contagious, as people imagined that they showed their zeal for the
new order of things by an extravagant way of thinking and living.
The fanaticism of the Republicans had been accompanied with true
strictness of manners, and hence nothing appeared more convenient than
to obtain the character of Royalists by the extravagant inclination
for all lawful and unlawful pleasures.

"The age of Louis XIV. was nowhere imitated with greater depravity.
The prevailing gallantry at the Court of France was not without
reserve and tenderness of feeling; they sinned, if I may so speak,
with some degree of dignity, and no man ventured to attack what was
honourable, though his own actions might not exactly coincide with it.
The English played a part which was altogether unnatural to them; they
gave themselves heavily up to levity; they everywhere confounded
the coarsest licentiousness with free mental vivacity, and did not
perceive that the sort of grace which is still compatible with
depravity, disappears with the last veil which it throws off."

As Schlegel goes on to say, we can easily imagine into what direction
the tastes of the English people drifted under such auspices. "They
possessed no real knowledge of the fine arts, and these were merely
favoured like other foreign fashions and inventions of luxury. They
neither felt a true want of poetry, nor had any relish for it; they
merely wished to be entertained in a brilliant and light manner. The
theatre, which in its former simplicity had attracted the spectators
solely by the excellence of the dramatic works and the actors, was now
furnished out with all the appendages with w