"[84]
The Puritans had pent up for so long the natural cravings for pleasure
and gaiety, that, when the barriers were withdrawn, license and
debauchery were necessary to satisfy appetites which a long-enforced
abstinence had made abnormal. In Vanburgh's "Provoked Wife," a comedy,
like so many others of the time, at once very immoral and very
entertaining, Sir John Brute thus excuses the virtues of his early
life: "I was afraid of being damned in those days; for I kept sneaking,
cowardly company, fellows that went to church, said grace to their
meat, and had not the least tincture of quality about them."
_Heartfree_: "But I think you have got into a better gang now." _Sir
John_: "Zoons, sir, my Lord Rake and I are hand in glove."[85] In the
country, people were generally satisfied with getting back their
May-poles and Sunday games. But in London, where the rule of Puritanism
had been the strictest, and above all among the courtiers, the new
liberty resulted in a license and shamelessness unequalled in English
history.

In the general proscription of Puritan ideas, the good were involved in
the same destruction as the bad. Religion was mocked at as a cloak for
hypocrisy, self-restraint was thrown aside as an obstacle to enjoyment.
It was thought that emancipation from Puritan tyranny could not be
attained more effectually than by a life of open licentiousness; by
gambling and drunkenness. Such, under the Restoration, were the
occupations most attractive to the gentlemen of fashion. Buckingham,
Rochester, and the troop of courtiers who looked to them for an
example, spent their lives in sinking into an ever deeper depravity.
Their thoughts and mouths were never clean. The verses they wrote are
too foul to transcribe as an illustration of the taste of their
composers. The orgies in which they indulged were not scenes of gaiety,
in which buoyant spirits and lively wit might excuse excess, but were
serious, bestial, and premeditated. The dealings of these men with the
female sex were but a succession of low intrigues, which destroyed all
sentiment and left nothing but disgust behind them. We hear a great
deal about "love" in the literature of the time, but it is the same
kind of love that might be found among a herd of cattle. It would be
difficult to mention any man about the court of Charles II who could
have appreciated the pure and enduring passion which in the century
before had breathed through the noble lines of Spens