atest enjoyment and most congenial
occupation in drunkenness, duelling, and seduction, it is not to be
expected that women should have retained an unappreciated refinement.
Half-naked and ornamented with a profusion of jewels, they look out
from the portraits of the time with a sleepy, voluptuous expression,
which suggests a lack of intelligence and too great a susceptibility to
physical impressions. Women as we find them in contemporary memoirs,
and these most often deal with such as are about the court, are not
unfit companions for the men. We see not a few the willing victims of
coarse intrigues, and some even assisting in the degradation of others
of their sex. Many of them swore "good mouth filling oaths," and the
scandal they talked would have shocked the taste as well as the
principles of Elizabeth's time. In the eighteenth century much
coarseness is to be seen in literature and society, but we are
constantly meeting with the words "delicacy" and "indelicacy" in their
application to social refinement, and it is evident that the ideas of
that time on this subject differ from ours only in degree. Under the
Restoration, these words, or the thoughts they represent, had a very
insignificant existence. Public taste inclined to the gross and the
sensual, and welcomed as enjoyable, what the present discards as
disgusting. Ladies of the highest rank sat through plays of which the
purpose and effect was to degrade their own womanhood, to remove from
the minds of the men who sat about and watched their countenances at
each new obscenity, whatever respect for the sex might have lingered
there. Some wore masks to hide the blushes which might have been looked
for as a drama proceeded, which represented every female character on
the stage as little better than an animal, using such reason as she
possessed only to further the gratification of her appetites. Under
such conditions there could be no encouragement for maiden modesty, and
for old age no crown.

It is usually unfair to judge a community by its theatre, to which an
exceptional liberty must always be allowed. But the drama of the
Restoration may be said to reflect with much truth the popular taste.
For the noblest efforts of dramatic genius the student turns by
preference to the age of Elizabeth. There he finds art, beauty, and
poetry; there he finds human nature, with its nobility and its
littleness, with its virtues and its vices. The time of Charles II was
as narrow