other had they found the
Lord. Amusements were sins; theatres, plague-spots; trifles, felonies; art
was an abomination and love a shame.[68]

Israel could not have been more depressing than England was then. A
reaction was indicated. Even without Charles it would have come. But when
the arid air was displaced by the Gallic atmosphere which he brought,
England turned a handspring. The godliness that hitherto had stalked
unchecked was flouted into seclusion. Anything appertaining to Puritanism
was jeered away. Only in the ultra-conservatism of the middle-classes did
prudery persist. Elsewhere, among criminals and courtiers, the new fashion
was instantly in vogue. The memoirs and diaries of the reign disclose a
world of rakes and demi-reps, a life of brawls and assignations, much
drink, high play, great oaths, a form of existence summarizable in the
episode of Buckingham and Shrewsbury in which the former killed the
latter, while Lady Shrewsbury, dressed as a page, held the duke's horse,
and approvingly looked on.

The Elizabethan and intermediate dramatists, mirroring life as they saw
it, displayed infidelity as a punishable crime and constancy as a
rewardable virtue. By the dramatists of the Restoration adultery was
represented as a polite occupation and virtue as a provincial oddity. Men
wooed and women were won as readily as they were handed in to supper,
scarcely, Macaulay noted, with anything that could be called a preference,
the men making up to the women for the same reason that they wore wigs,
because it was the fashion, because, otherwise, they would have been
thought city prigs, puritans for that matter. Love is not discernible in
that society though philosophy is. But it was the philosophy of Hobbes who
taught that good and evil are terms used to designate our appetites and
aversions.

Higher up, Charles II, indolent, witty, debonair, tossing handkerchiefs
among women who were then, as English gentlewomen are to-day, the most
beautiful in the world, was suffering from that nostalgia for mud which
affected the fifteenth Louis.

The Du Barry, who dishonored the scaffold as well as the throne, has a
family likeness to Nell Gwynne. Equally canaille, the preliminary
occupations of these grisettes differed only in taste. One sold herrings,
the other hats. The Du Barry's sole heirs were the cocottes of the Second
Empire. From Nell, the dukes of St. Albans descend. From Barbara Palmer
come the dukes of Grafton; f