tide of pleasure and frivolity
were borne away many who had long subsisted upon their reputations for
peculiar piety. Not only did the leopard who had changed his spots,
and the Ethiopian his skin, for political purposes when the Civil War
bore the Puritans into power, return to their real markings, but great
numbers of those who had sustained their Puritanical professions with
greater or lesser degrees of sincerity and earnestness caught the
maddening thrill of levity with which the very atmosphere seemed
surcharged, and rapidly passed down the gradations of character into
recklessness and vice.

The Royalists were well prepared for the change from piety to
profligacy, and hailed the advent of the light-hearted monarch as a
veritable release of souls in prison. During the Commonwealth, the
wretchedness of their condition had wrought the widespread depravity
which existed among them. The uncertainty of their fortunes and
the necessity of often meeting together made them _habitues_ of the
taverns, which were the centres for social intercourse; and it may
have been thus that the habit of excessive drinking, so prevalent
in this period, was contracted. Upon the principle that no one gives
serious heed to the doings of a drunkard, abandoned and dissolute
habits were looked upon by the Royalist plotters as a safeguard for
themselves and a security to their plans:

"Come, fill my cup, until it swim
With foam that overlooks the brim.
Who drinks the deepest? Here's to him.
Sobriety and study breeds
Suspicion in our acts and deeds;
The downright drunkard no man heeds."

The very vices, however, which the Royalists acknowledged having been
led to cultivate by their "pride, poverty, and passion" were imitated
by the baser element among the Puritans when the Cavaliers became
triumphant. Those who formerly had boasted that they "would as soon
cut a Cavalier's throat as swear an oath, and esteem it a less sin,"
now assumed the role of sinners as complacently as they had previously
played the part of saints.

A period of industrial depression subtracts, in the estimation of
the people, from the merits of a government, however noble may be its
policy; and for twenty years previous to the Restoration the condition
of the masses of the people had steadily been growing worse, so that
there was a widespread longing for more provisions and less piety.
Before the Civil War, the state of the people had reached high-water