|
1640. Long Parliament |
|
1642. Civil War begins | 1642. Browne's Religio Medici
|
1643. Scotch Covenant |
|
1643. Press censorship | 1644. Milton's Areopagitica
|
1645. Battle of Naseby; |
triumph of Puritans |
|
1649. Execution of Charles I. |
Cavalier migration to Virginia |
|
1649-1660. Commonwealth | 1649. Milton's Tenure of Kings
|
| 1650. Baxter's Saints' Rest.
| Jeremy Taylor's Holy Living
|
| 1651. Hobbes's Leviathan
|
1653-1658. Cromwell, Protector | 1653. Walton's Complete Angler
|
1658-1660. Richard Cromwell |
|
1660. Restoration of Charles II | 1663-1694. Dryden's dramas
| (next chapter)
|
| 1666. Bunyan's Grace Abounding
|
| 1667. Paradise Lost
|
| 1674. Death of Milton
|
| 1678. Pilgrim's Progress published
| (written earlier)
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* * * * *

CHAPTER VIII

PERIOD OF THE RESTORATION (1660-1700)

THE AGE OF FRENCH INFLUENCE

HISTORY OF THE PERIOD. It seems a curious contradiction, at first glance,
to place the return of Charles II at the beginning of modern England, as
our historians are wont to do; for there was never a time when the progress
of liberty, which history records, was more plainly turned backwards. The
Puritan regime had been too severe; it had repressed too many natural
pleasures. Now, released from restraint, society abandoned the decencies of
life and the reverence for law itself, and plunged into excesses more
unnatural than had been the restraints of Puritanism. The inevitable effec