e jest of the other. The pleasures
of each were the torments of the other. To the stern precisian even the
innocent sport of the fancy seemed a crime. To light and festive natures
the solemnity of the zealous brethren furnished copious matter of
ridicule. From the Reformation to the civil war, almost every writer,
gifted with a fine sense of the ludicrous, had taken some opportunity of
assailing the straighthaired, snuffling, whining saints, who christened
their children out of the Book of Nehemiah, who groaned in spirit at
the sight of Jack in the Green, and who thought it impious to taste plum
porridge on Christmas day. At length a time came when the laughers began
to look grave in their turn. The rigid, ungainly zealots, after having
furnished much good sport during two generations, rose up in arms,
conquered, ruled, and, grimly smiling, trod down under their feet the
whole crowd of mockers. The wounds inflicted by gay and petulant malice
were retaliated with the gloomy and implacable malice peculiar to bigots
who mistake their own rancour for virtue. The theatres were closed.
The players were flogged. The press was put under the guardianship of
austere licensers. The Muses were banished from their own favourite
haunts, Cambridge and Oxford. Cowly, Crashaw, and Cleveland were ejected
from their fellowships. The young candidate for academical honours was
no longer required to write Ovidian epistles or Virgilian pastorals, but
was strictly interrogated by a synod of lowering Supralapsarians as to
the day and hour 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 slavedriver can expect from insurgent
slaves still bearing the marks of his collars and his scourges.

The war between wit and Puritanism soon became a war between wit and
morality. The hostility excited by a grotesque caricature of virtue did
not spare virtue herself. Whatever the canting Roundhead had regarded
with reverence was insult