mark; so vast had been the increase of England's commerce, owing to
the strife among the neighboring powers, that the revenue from customs
had almost doubled, and the blessings of prosperity were felt among
all classes. Sir Philip Warwick even asks us to believe that there
was scarcely any cobbler in London whose wife did not include a silver
beaker among the furnishings of her modest sideboard. During the
Commonwealth, pauperism increased to an alarming extent, so that at
the time of the coming of Charles ten thousand men and women were
languishing in the debtors' prisons, and thousands of others were
living in continual dread of the sheriff's executions.

The condition of English society at the coming of Charles II. explains
somewhat the tremendous outburst of popular enthusiasm with which that
event was greeted. The people on the village green received him with
morris dances to the music of pipe and tabor, and with other rustic
festivities which for so long a time had been banished as sinful
engagements. At some of the towns through which the triumphal
procession passed, young damsels to the number of hundreds lined
the way and strewed flowers in the path of the king. The women were
especially noticeable for their active participation in all the
popular demonstrations. It was as if they had felt so heavily the
repression of the rigorous theocracy of Cromwell that they were ready
to accept to the fullest the pledge of better times which the return
of Charles gave them, and to pass from fuller liberty into the
wildest license. The king himself, by his own example, lost no time in
establishing the new standards of conduct. Even the reckless spirit of
the Londoners was somewhat surprised when it was bruited abroad that
the king, who was received as a Divine dispensation to a waiting
people, had slunk out of the palace the first night after his return,
under cover of darkness, in the furtherance of one of the unsavory
intrigues which made his life and his court notorious in the annals
of English history. The sensibilities of the English people were not
seriously shocked, however,--we are speaking of the Royalist following
and not of the Puritans,--and in the rebound from the first amazement
at the revelation they received of the kingly character, they were
ready to follow his lead; and so English social life during the reign
of Charles was greatly corrupted. As the key to the times is to be
sought in the tone of the court