ed. Whatever he had proscribed was favoured.
Because he had been scrupulous about trifles, all scruples were treated
with derision. Because he had covered his failings with the mask of
devotion, men were encouraged to obtrude with Cynic impudence all their
most scandalous vices on the public eye. Because he had punished illicit
love with barbarous severity, virgin purity and conjugal fidelity were
made a jest. To that sanctimonious jargon which was his Shibboleth, was
opposed another jargon not less absurd and much more odious. As he never
opened his mouth except in scriptural phrase, the new breed of wits and
fine gentlemen never opened their mouths without uttering ribaldry of
which a porter would now be ashamed, and without calling on their Maker
to curse them, sink them, confound them, blast them, and damn them.

It is not strange, therefore, that our polite literature, when it
revived with the revival of the old civil and ecclesiastical polity,
should have been profoundly immoral. A few eminent men, who belonged to
an earlier and better age, were exempt from the general contagion. The
verse of Waller still 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, meditates, 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 vigourous and fertile genius of Butler, if it did not altogether
escape the prevailing infection, took the disease in a mild form. But
these were men whose minds had been trained in a world which had passed
away. They gave place in no long time to a younger generation of
wits; and of that generation, from Dryden down to Durfey, the common
characteristic was hard-hearted, shameless, swaggering licentiousness,
at once inelegant and inhuman. The influence of these writers was
doubtless noxious, yet less noxious than it would have been had they
been less depraved. The poison which they administered was so strong
that it was, in no long time, rejected with nausea. None of them
understood the dangerous art of