in its way as the Puritans had been in theirs, and was as
little capable of forming broad and just views of mankind. The
Puritans, if they had had a stage, would have represented man as an
embodiment of moral qualities. The dramatists of the Restoration made
him merely a creature subject to animal desires and brutish instincts,
which he made no effort to regulate. "It might, not be easy perhaps,"
says Hallam, "to find a scene in any comedy of Charles II's reign,
where one character has the behavior of a gentleman, in the sense we
attach to the word."[86] The stage was in perfect accord with its
audience. Morality was outraged by a constant association of virtue
with all that is contemptible and of vice with all that is attractive.
Taste was outraged by a perpetual choice of degraded subjects and
disgusting scenes. Nature was outraged by the representation of man,
not as a complex being, worthy of deep and skilful investigation, but
as a creature influenced by two or three passions always apparent on
the surface. Thus the dramatists, notwithstanding their very
exceptional abilities, produced little of enduring value, and nothing
which could outlive a change in the popular taste. They did, however,
produce what was greatly admired by their contemporaries: and the fact
that the men and the women of the time enjoyed the plays provided for
them, shows that they preferred to noble and elevating subjects, the
literary reproduction of their own corrupt lives. The theatre no doubt
represented men as worse than they were. But the friends of Buckingham
and Rochester, both male and female, found in its long list of
unprincipled men, of married women debauched, and of young girls
anxious to be debauched, the reflection and justification of their own
careers.

Posterity remembers little of the reign or the theatre of Charles II
beyond their corruption. Yet there is much that is worthy of
remembrance, without which any remarks on the social condition of the
time would be one-sided. There are to be referred to that period many
legislative enactments in the highest degree conducive to civil and
religious liberty. The foundation of the Royal Society marked the
inauguration of a new interest in speculative enquiry, of a great
activity in scientific research, and of a broader and more liberal
habit of thought on questions connected with government and education.
These advantages were attained in spite of a worthless king, of corrupt
mini