, that these high pretensions were unfounded.
Accordingly, the fashionable circles, and the comic poets who were the
spokesmen of those circles, took up the notion that all professions of
piety and integrity were to be construed by the rule of contrary; that
it might well be doubted whether there was such a thing as virtue in the
world; but that, at all events, a person who affected to be better than
his neighbors was sure to be a knave.

In the old drama there had been much that was reprehensible. But whoever
compares even the least decorous plays of Fletcher with those contained
in the volume before us will see how much the profligacy which follows a
period of overstrained austerity goes beyond the profligacy which
precedes such a period. The nation resembled the demoniac in the New
Testament. The Puritans boasted that the unclean spirit was cast out.
The house was empty, swept, and garnished; and for a time the expelled
tenant wandered through dry places seeking rest and finding none. But
the force of the exorcism was spent. The fiend returned to his abode;
and returned not alone. He took to him seven other spirits more wicked
than himself. They entered in, and dwelt together: and the second
possession was worse than the first.

We will now, as far as our limits will permit, pass in review the
writers to whom Mr. Leigh Hunt has introduced us. Of the four, Wycherley
stands, we think, last in literary merit, but first in order of time,
and first, beyond all doubt, in immorality.

William Wycherley was born in 1640. He was the son of a Shropshire
gentleman of old family, and of what was then accounted a good estate.
The property was estimated at six hundred a year, a fortune which, among
the fortunes at that time, probably ranked as a fortune of two thousand
a year would rank in our days.

William was an infant when the Civil War broke out: and while he was
still in his rudiments, a Presbyterian hierarchy and a republican
government were established on the ruins of the ancient church and
throne. Old Mr. Wycherley was attached to the royal cause, and was not
disposed to entrust the education of his heir to the solemn Puritans who
now ruled the universities and public schools. Accordingly the young
gentleman was sent at fifteen to France. He resided some time in the
neighborhood of the Duke of Montausier, chief of one of the noblest
families of Touraine. The Duke's wife, a daughter of the house of
Rambouillet, was a f