and implacable malice peculiar to bigots | phrase, the new breed of wits and fine who mistake their own rancour for gentlemen never opened their mouths virtue. The theatres were closed. The without uttering ribaldry of which a players were flogged. The press was porter would now be ashamed, and put under the guardianship of austere without calling on their Maker to curse licensers. The Muses were banished them, sink them, confound them, blast from their own favourite haunts, Cam- them, and damn them. bridge and Oxford. Cowley, Crashaw, It is not strange, therefore, that our and Cleveland were ejected from their polite literature, when it revived with fellowships. The young candidate for the revival of the old civil and ecclesiacademical honours was no longer re-astical polity, should have been proquired to write Ovidian epistles or foundly immoral. A few eminent men, Virgilian pastorals, but was strictly who belonged to an earlier and better interrogated by a synod of lowering age, were exempt from the general Supralapsarians as to the day and hour contagion. The verse of Waller still when he experienced the new birth. Such a system was of course fruitful of hypocrites. Under sober clothing and under visages composed to the expression of austerity lay hid during several years the intense desire of license and of revenge. At length that desire was gratified. The Restoration emancipated thousands of minds from a yoke which had become insupportable. The old fight recommenced, but with an animosity altogether new. It was now not a sportive combat, but a war to the death. The Roundhead had no better quarter to expect from those whom he had persecuted than a cruel slave driver can expect from insurgent slaves still bearing the marks of his collars and his scourges. breathed the sentiments which had animated a more chivalrous generation. Cowley, distinguished as a loyalist and as a man of letters, raised his voice courageously against the immorality which disgraced both letters and loyalty. A mightier poet, tried at once by pain, danger, poverty, obloquy, and blindness, meditated, undisturbed by the obscene tumult which raged all around him, a song so sublime and so holy that it would not have misbecome the lips of those ethereal Virtues whom he saw, with that inner eye which no calamity could darken, flinging down on the jasper pavement their crowns of amaranth and gold. The vigorous and fertile genius of Butler, if it did not altogether escape the prevailing infecThe war between wit and Puritanism tion, took the disease in a mild form. soon became a war between wit and But these were men whose minds had morality. The hostility excited by a been trained in a world which had grotesque caricature of virtue did not passed away. They gave place in no spare virtue herself. Whatever the long time to a younger generation of canting Roundhead had regarded with wits; and of that generation, from reverence was insulted. Whatever he Dryden down to Durfey, the common had proscribed was favoured. Because characteristic was hard-hearted, shamehe had been scrupulous about trifles, less, swaggering licentiousness, at once all scruples were treated with derision. inelegant and inhuman. The influence Because he had covered his failings of these writers was doubtless noxious, with the mask of devotion, men were yet less noxious than it would have encouraged to obtrude with Cynic impu- been had they been less depraved. The dence all their most scandalous vices on poison which they administered was so the public eye. Because he had punish- strong that it was, in no long time, ed illicit love with barbarous severity, rejected with nausea. None of them virgin purity and conjugal fidelity were understood the dangerous art of assomade à jest. To that sanctimonious ciating images of unlawful pleasure jargon which was his Shibboleth, was with all that is endearing and ennoopposed another jargon not less absurd bling. None of them was aware that and much more odious. As he never a certain decorum is essential even opened his mouth except in scriptural to voluptuousness, that drapery may be more alluring than exposure, and that the imagination may be far more powerfully moved by delicate hints which impel it to exert itself, than by gross descriptions which it takes in passively. beautiful girl, who was supposed to have not yet lost her innocence.* Our theatre was indebted in that age for many plots and characters to Spain, to France, and to the old English masters but whatever our dramatists touched they tainted. In their imitations the houses of Calderon's stately and highspirited Castilian gentlemen became sties of vice, Shakspeare's Viola a procuress, Moliere's Misanthrope a ravisher, Moliere's Agnes an adulteress. Nothing could be so pure or so heroic but that it became foul and ignoble by transfusion through those foul and ignoble minds. The spirit of the Antipuritan reaction pervades almost the whole polite literature of the reign of Charles the Second. But the very quintessence of that spirit will be found in the comic drama. The playhouses, shut by the meddling fanatic in the day of his power, were again crowded. To their old attractions new and more powerful attractions had been added. Scenery, dresses, and decorations, such as would Such was the state of the drama; now be thought mean or absurd, but and the drama was the department of such as would have been esteemed polite literature in which a poet had incredibly magnificent by those who, the best chance of obtaining a subsistearly in the seventeenth century, sate ence by his pen. The sale of books on the filthy benches of the Hope, or was so small that a man of the greatest under the thatched roof of the Rose, name could hardly expect more than a dazzled the eyes of the multitude. The pittance for the copyright of the best fascination of sex was called in to aid performance. There cannot be a stronger the fascination of art: and the young instance than the fate of Dryden's last spectator saw, with emotions unknown production, the Fables. That volume to the contemporaries of Shakspeare was published when he was universally and Jonson, tender and sprightly admitted to be the chief of living Engheroines personated by lovely women. From the day on which the theatres were reopened they became seminaries of vice; and the evil propagated itself. The profligacy of the representations soon drove away sober people. The frivolous and dissolute who remained required every year stronger and stronger stimulants. Thus the artists corrupted the spectators, and the spectators the artists, till the turpitude of the drama became such as must astonish all who are not aware that extreme relaxation is the natural effect of extreme restraint, and that an age of hypocrisy is, in the regular course of things, followed by an age of impudence. Nothing is more characteristic of the times than the care with which the poets contrived to put all their loosest verses into the mouths of women. The compositions in which the greatest license was taken were the epilogues. They were almost always recited by favourite actresses; and nothing charmed the depraved audience so much as to hear lines grossly indecent repeated by a lish poets. It contains about twelve thousand lines. The versification is admirable, the narratives and descriptions full of life. To this day Palamon and Arcite, Cymon and Iphigenia, Theodore and Honoria, are the delight both of critics and of schoolboys. The collection includes Alexander's Feast, the noblest ode in our language. For the copyright Dryden received two hundred and fifty pounds, less than in our days has sometimes been paid for two articles in a review. Nor does the bargain seem to have been a hard one. For the book went off slowly; and the second edition was not required till the author had been ten years in his grave. By writing for the theatre it was possible to earn a much larger sum with much less trouble. Southern made seven hundred pounds by one play. Otway was raised from beggary to temporary affluence by the success of his Don right. Books were therefore frequently Carlos.* Shadwell cleared a hundred printed merely that they might be deand thirty pounds by a single represen-dicated. This traffic in praise protation of the Squire of Alsatia. The duced the effect which might have been consequence was that every man who expected. Adulation pushed to the had to live by his wit wrote plays, verge, sometimes of nonsense, and whether he had any internal vocation sometimes of impiety, was not thought to write plays or not. It was thus to disgrace a poet. Independence, with Dryden. As a satirist he has veracity, selfrespect, were things not rivalled Juvenal. As a didactic poet required by the world from him. In he perhaps might, with care and me- truth, he was in morals something beditation, have rivalled Lucretius. Of tween a pandar and a beggar. lyric poets he is, if not the most To the other vices which degraded sublime, the most brilliant and spirit- the literary character was added, tostirring. But nature, profuse to him wards the close of the reign of Charles of many rare gifts, had withheld from the Second, the most savage intemperhim the dramatic faculty. Neverthe-ance of party spirit. The wits, as a less all the energies of his best years class, had been impelled by their old were wasted on dramatic composition. hatred of Puritanism to take the side He had too much judgment not to be of the court, and had been found useful aware that in the power of exhibiting allies. Dryden, in particular, had character by means of dialogue he was done good service to the government. deficient. That deficiency he did his His Absalom and Achitophel, the best to conceal, sometimes by surpris- greatest satire of modern times, had ing and amusing incidents, sometimes amazed the town, had made its way by stately declamation, sometimes by with unprecedented rapidity even into harmonious numbers, sometimes by rural districts, and had, wherever it ribaldry but too well suited to the taste appeared, bitterly annoyed the Excluof a profane and licentious pit. Yet sionists, and raised the courage of the he never obtained any theatrical suc- Tories. But we must not, in the admicess equal to that which rewarded the ration which we naturally feel for noble exertions of some men far inferior to diction and versification, forget the him in general powers. He thought great distinctions of good and evil. himself fortunate if he cleared a hun-The spirit by which Dryden and sevedred guineas by a play; a scanty re-ral of his compeers were at this time muneration, yet apparently larger than animated against the Whigs deserves he could have earned in any other way by the same quantity of labour. The recompense which the wits of that age could obtain from the public was so small, that they were under the necessity of eking out their incomes by levying contributions on the great. Every rich and goodnatured lord was pestered by authors with a mendicancy so importunate, and a flattery so abject, as may in our time seem incredible. The patron to whom a work was inscribed was expected to reward the writer with a purse of gold. The fee paid for the dedication of a book was often much larger than the sum which any publisher would give for the copy * See Rochester's Trial of the Poets. to be called fiendish. The servile Judges and Sheriffs of those evil days could not shed blood so fast as the poets cried out for it. Calls for more victims, hideous jests on hanging, bitter taunts on those who, having stood by the King in the hour of danger, now advised him to deal mercifully and generously by his vanquished enemies, were publicly recited on the stage, and, that nothing might be wanting to the guilt and the shame, were recited by women, who, having long been taught to discard all modesty, were now taught to discard all compassion.* *If any reader thinks my expressions too severe, I would advise him to read Dryden's Epilogue to the Duke of Guise, and to observe that it was spoken by a woman. State of In It is a remarkable fact that, while when the heralds were to uncover, these, the lighter literature of Eng- and a hundred more such trifles, were science in land was thus becoming a nui- gravely considered and arranged by England. sance and a national disgrace, men of no common capacity and learnthe English genius was effecting in ing. But the time for these visions science a revolution which will, to the had gone by; and, if any steadfast reend of time, be reckoned among the publican still continued to amuse himhighest achievements of the human self with them, fear of public derision intellect. Bacon had sown the good and of a criminal information generally seed in a sluggish soil and an ungenial induced him to keep his fancies to himseason. He had not expected an early self. It was now unpopular and unsafe crop, and in his last testament had to mutter a word against the fundasolemnly bequeathed his fame to the mental laws of the monarchy: but next age. During a whole generation daring and ingenious men might inhis philosophy had, amidst tumults, demnify themselves by treating with wars, and proscriptions, been slowly disdain what had lately been considered ripening in a few well constituted as the fundamental laws of nature. minds. While factions were struggling The torrent which had been dammed for dominion over each other, a small up in one channel rushed violently body of sages had turned away with into another. The revolutionary spirit, benevolent disdain from the conflict, ceasing to operate in politics, began to and had devoted themselves to the exert itself with unprecedented vigour nobler work of extending the dominion and hardihood in every department of of man over matter. As soon as tran- physics. The year 1660, the era of the quillity was restored, these teachers restoration of the old constitution, is easily found attentive audience. For also the era from which dates the the discipline through which the nation ascendency of the new philosophy. had passed had brought the public that year the Royal Society, destined mind to a temper well fitted for the re- to be a chief agent in a long series of ception of the Verulamian doctrine. glorious and salutary reforms, began to The civil troubles had stimulated the fa-exist. In a few months experimental culties of the educated classes, and had science became all the mode. called forth a restless activity and an in- transfusion of blood, the ponderation satiable curiosity, such as had not before of air, the fixation of mercury, sucbeen known among us. Yet the effect of ceeded to that place in the public mind those troubles was that schemes of poli- which had been lately occupied by the tical and religious reform were generally controversies of the Rota. Dreams of regarded with suspicion and contempt. perfect forms of government made way During twenty years the chief employ- for dreams of wings with which men ment of busy and ingenious men had been were to fly from the Tower to the to frame constitutions with first magis-Abbey, and of doublekeeled ships which trates, without first magistrates, with he- were never to founder in the fiercest reditary senates, with senates appointed by lot, with annual senates, with perpetual senates. In these plans nothing was omitted. All the detail, all the nomenclature, all the ceremonial of the imaginary government was fully set forth, Polemarchs and Phylarchs, Tribes and Galaxies, the Lord Archon and the Lord Strategus. Which ballot boxes were to be green and which red, which balls were to be of gold and which of silver, which magistrates were to wear hats and which black velvet caps with peaks, how the mace was to be carried and VOL. L. The storm. All classes were hurried along honey, that land which their great In this, as in every great stir of the deliverer and lawgiver had seen, as human mind, there was doubtless somefrom the summit of Pisgah, but had thing which might well move a smile. not been permitted to enter.* Dryden, It is the universal law that whatever with more zeal than knowledge, joined pursuit, whatever doctrine, becomes his voice to the general acclamation, fashionable, shall lose a portion of that and foretold things which neither he dignity which it had possessed while it nor anybody else understood. The was confined to a small but earnest Royal Society, he predicted, would soon minority, and was loved for its own lead us to the extreme verge of the sake alone. It is true that the follies globe, and there delight us with a of some persons who, without any real better view of the moon.† Two able aptitude for science, professed a passion and aspiring prelates, Ward, Bishop of for it, furnished matter of contemptuous Salisbury, and Wilkins, Bishop of mirth to a few malignant satirists who Chester, were conspicuous among the belonged to the preceding generation, leaders of the movement. Its history and were not disposed to unlearn the was eloquently written by a younger lore of their youth.* But it is not less divine, who was rising to high distinc- true that the great work of interpreting tion in his profession, Thomas Sprat, nature was performed by the English afterwards Bishop of Rochester. Both of that age as it had never before been Chief Justice Hale and Lord Keeper performed in any age by any nation. Guildford stole some hours from the The spirit of Francis Bacon was business of their courts to write on abroad, a spirit admirably compounded hydrostatics. Indeed it was under the of audacity and sobriety. There was a immediate direction of Guildford that strong persuasion that the whole world the first barometers ever exposed to was full of secrets of high moment to the sale in London were constructed. happiness of man, and that man had, Chemistry divided, for a time, with by his Maker, been entrusted with the wine and love, with the stage and the key which, rightly used, would give gaming table, with the intrigues of a access to them. There was at the same courtier and the intrigues of a dema-time a conviction that in physics it was gogue, the attention of the fickle impossible to arrive at the knowledge Buckingham. Rupert has the credit of general laws except by the careful of having invented mezzotinto; and observation of particular facts. Deeply from him is named that curious bubble impressed with these great truths, the of glass which has long amused children professors of the new philosophy applied and puzzled philosophers. Charles themselves to their task, and, before a himself had a laboratory at Whitehall, quarter of a century had expired, they and was far more active and attentive had given ample earnest of what has there than at the council board. It since been achieved. Already a reform was almost necessary to the character of agriculture had been commenced. of a fine gentleman to have something to say about airpumps and telescopes; and even fine ladies, now and then, thought it becoming to affect a taste for science, went in coaches and six to visit the Gresham curiosities, and broke forth into cries of delight at finding that a magnet really attracted a needle, and that a microscope really made a fly look as large as a sparrow.§ * Cowley's Ode to the Royal Society. And view the ocean leaning on the sky; New vegetables were cultivated. New implements of husbandry were employed. New manures were applied to the soil. Evelyn had, under the formal sanction of the Royal Society, given instruction to his countrymen in plant * Butler was, I think, the only man of rea genius who, between the Restoration and the Revolution, showed a bitter enmity to the new philosophy, as it was then called. See the Satire on the Royal Society, and the Elephant in the Moon. †The eagerness with which the agricultur ists of that age tried experiments and intro duced improvements is well described by Aubrey. See the Natural History of Wiltshire, 1685. |