service to the cause of virtue, it has | Lewis the Fourteenth in his old age

in truth only promoted vice.

became religious: he determined that For what are the means by which a his subjects should be religious too: government can effect its ends? Two he shrugged his shoulders and knitted only, reward and punishment; power- his brows if he observed at his levee ful means, indeed, for influencing the or near his dinner-table any gentleexterior act, but altogether impotent man who neglected the duties enjoined for the purpose of touching the heart. by the church, and rewarded piety with A public functionary who is told that blue ribands, invitations to Marli, gohe will be promoted if he is a devout vernments, pensions, and regiments. Catholic, and turned out of his place Forthwith Versailles became, in every if he is not, will probably go to mass thing but dress, a convent. The pulevery morning, exclude meat from his pits and confessionals were surrounded table on Fridays, shrive himself re- by swords and embroidery. The Margularly, and perhaps let his superiors shals of France were much in prayer; know that he wears a hair shirt next and there was hardly one among the his skin. Under a Puritan govern- Dukes and Peers who did not carry ment, a person who is apprised that good little books in his pocket, fast piety is essential to thriving in the during Lent, and communicate at world will be strict in the observance Easter. Madame de Maintenon, who of the Sunday, or, as he will call it, had a great share in the blessed work, Sabbath, and will avoid a theatre as if boasted that devotion had become quite it were plague-stricken. Such a show the fashion. A fashion indeed it was; of religion as this the hope of gain and like a fashion it passed away. No and the fear of loss will produce, at a sooner had the old king been carried week's notice, in any abundance which to St. Denis than the whole court una government may require. But under masked. Every man hastened to this show, sensuality, ambition, avarice, indemnify himself, by the excess of and hatred retain unimpaired power, licentiousness and impudence, for years and the seeming convert has only of mortification. The same persons added to the vices of a man of the who, a few months before, with meek world all the still darker vices which voices and demure looks, had consulted are engendered by the constant prac-divines about the state of their souls, tice of dissimulation. The truth can- now surrounded the midnight table not be long concealed. The public where, amidst the bounding of chamdiscovers that the grave persons who pagne corks, a drunken prince, enare proposed to it as patterns are more throned between Dubois and Madame utterly destitute of moral principle and de Parabère, hiccoughed out atheistical of moral sensibility than avowed liber- arguments and obscene jests. The tines. It sees that these Pharisees are early part of the reign of Lewis the farther removed from real goodness Fourteenth had been a time of license; than publicans and harlots. And, as but the most dissolute men of that geusual, it rushes to the extreme opposite neration would have blushed at the to that which it quits. It considers a orgies of the Regency. high religious profession as a sure mark of meanness and depravity. On the very first day on which the restraint of fear is taken away, and on which men can venture to say what they think, a frightful peal of blasphemy and ribaldry proclaims that the short-sighted policy which aimed at making a nation of saints has made a nation of scoffers.

It was thus in France about the beginning of the eighteenth century.

It was the same with our fathers in the time of the Great Civil War. We are by no means unmindful of the great debt which mankind owes to the Puritans of that time, the deliverers of England, the founders of the American Commonwealths. But in the day of their power, those men committed one great fault, which left deep and lasting traces in the national character and manners. They mistook the end and overrated the force of

government. They determined, not | nose, and showed the whites of his merely to protect religion and public eyes; whether he named his children morals from insult, an object for which Assurance, Tribulation, and Maherthe civil sword, in discreet hands, may shalah-hash-baz; whether he avoided be beneficially employed, but to make Spring Garden when in town, and abthe people committed to their rule stained from hunting and hawking truly devout. Yet, if they had only when in the country; whether he exreflected on events which they had pounded hard scriptures to his troop of themselves witnessed and in which they dragoons, and talked in a committee of had themselves borne a great part, ways and means about seeking the they would have seen what was likely Lord. These were tests which could to be the result of their enterprise. easily be applied. The misfortune was They had lived under a government that they were tests which proved nowhich, during a long course of years, thing. Such as they were, they were did all that could be done, by lavish employed by the dominant party. And bounty and by rigorous punishment, to the consequence was that a crowd of enforce conformity to the doctrine and impostors, in every walk of life, began discipline of the Church of England. to mimic and to caricature what were No person suspected of hostility to that then regarded as the outward signs of church had the smallest chance of ob- sanctity. The nation was not duped. taining favour at the court of Charles. The restraints of that gloomy time were Avowed dissent was punished by im- such as would have been impatiently prisonment, by ignominious exposure, borne, if imposed by men who were by cruel mutilations, and by ruinous universally believed to be saints. Those fines. And the event had been that restraints became altogether insupportthe Church had fallen, and had, in its able when they were known to be kept fall, dragged down with it a monarchy up for the profit of hypocrites. It is which had stood six hundred years. quite certain that, even if the royal The Puritan might have learned, if family had never returned, even if from nothing else, yet from his own Richard Cromwell or Henry Cromwell recent victory, that governments which had been at the head of the adminisattempt things beyond their reach are tration, there would have been a great likely not merely to fail, but to produce relaxation of manners. Before the an effect directly the opposite of that Restoration many signs indicated that which they contemplate as desirable. a period of license was at hand. The Restoration crushed for a time the Puritan party, and placed supreme power in the hands of a libertine. The political counter-revolution assisted the

All this was overlooked. The saints were to inherit the earth. The theatres were closed. The fine arts were placed under absurd restraints. Vices which had never before been even misde- moral counter-revolution, and was in meanors were made capital felonies. It was solemnly resolved by Parliament "that no person shall be employed but such as the House shall be satisfied of his real godliness." The pious assembly had a Bible lying on the table for reference. If they had consulted it they might have learned that the wheat and the tares grow together inseparably, and must either be spared together or rooted up together. To know whether a man was really godly was impossible. But it was easy to know whether he had a plain dress, lank hair, no starch in his linen, no gay furniture in his house; whether he talked through his

turn assisted by it. A period of wild and desperate dissoluteness followed. Even in remote manor-houses and hamlets the change was in some degree felt; but in London the outbreak of debauchery was appalling; and in London the places most deeply infected were the Palace, the quarters inhabited by the aristocracy, and the Inns of Court. It was on the support of these parts of the town that the playhouses depended. The character of the drama became conformed to the character of its patrons. The comic poet was the mouthpiece of the most deeply corrupted part of a corrupted society.

And in the plays before us we find, distilled and condensed, the essential spirit of the fashionable world during the Anti-puritan reaction.

The Puritan had affected formality; the comic poet laughed at decorum. The Puritan had frowned at innocent diversions; the comic poet took under his patronage the most flagitious excesses. The Puritan had canted; the comic poet blasphemed. The Puritan had made an affair of gallantry felony without benefit of clergy; the comic poet represented it as an honourable distinction. The Puritan spoke with disdain of the low standard of popular morality; his life was regulated by a far more rigid code; his virtue was sustained by motives unknown to men of the world. Unhappily it had been amply proved in many cases, and might well be suspected in many more, that these high pretensions were unfounded. Accordingly, the fashionable circles, and the comic poets who were the spokesmen of those circles, took up the notion that all professions of piety and integrity were to be construed by the rule of contrary; that it might well be doubted whether there was such a thing as virtue in the world; but that, at all events, a person who affected to be better than his neighbours was sure to be a knave.

We will now, as far as our limits will permit, pass in review the writers to whom Mr. Leigh Hunt has introduced us. Of the four, Wycherley stands, we think, last in literary merit, but first in order of time, and first, beyond all doubt, in immorality.

WILLIAM WYCHERLEY was born in 1640. He was the son of a Shropshire gentleman of old family, and of what was then accounted a good estate. The property was estimated at six hundred a year, a fortune which, among the fortunes at that time, probably ranked as a fortune of two thousand a year would rank in our days.

William was an infant when the civil war broke out; and, while he was still in his rudiments, a Presbyterian hierarchy and a republican government were established on the ruins of the ancient church and throne. Old Mr. Wycherley was attached to the royal cause, and was not disposed to intrust the education of his heir to the solemn Puritans who now ruled the universities and public schools. Accordingly the young gentleman was sent at fifteen to France. He resided some time in the neighbourhood of the Duke of Montausier, chief of one of the noblest families of Touraine. The Duke's wife, a daughter of the house of Rambouillet, was a finished specimen In the old drama there had been of those talents and accomplishments much that was reprehensible. But for which her race was celebrated. whoever compares even the least deco- The young foreigner was introduced to rous plays of Fletcher with those con- the splendid circle which surrounded tained in the volume before us will see the duchess, and there he appears to how much the profligacy which follows have learned some good and some evil. a period of overstrained austerity goes In a few years he returned to his beyond the profligacy which precedes country a fine gentleman and a Papist. such a period. The nation resembled His conversion, it may safely be affirmthe demoniac in the New Testament. ed, was the effect not of any strong The Puritans boasted that the unclean impression on his understanding, or spirit was cast out. The house was feelings, but partly of intercourse with empty, swept, and garnished; and for an agreeable society in which the a time the expelled tenant wandered Church of Rome was the fashion, and through dry places seeking rest and partly of that aversion to Calvinistic finding none. But the force of the austerities which was then almost uniexorcism was spent. The fiend re-versal among young Englishmen of turned to his abode; and returned not parts and spirit, and which, at one alone. He took to him seven other time, seemed likely to make one half spirits more wicked than himself. They of them Catholics, and the other half entered in, and dwelt together: and Atheists. the second possession was worse than the first.

But the Restoration came. The universities were again in loyal hands;

Wycherley left Oxford without taking a degree, and entered at the Temple, where he lived gaily for some years, observing the humours of the town, enjoying its pleasures, and picking up just as much law as was necessary to make the character of a pettifogging attorney or of a litigious client entertaining in a comedy.

and there was reason to hope that there | before his talents were ripe, before his would be again a national church fit style was formed, before he had looked for a gentleman. Wycherley became abroad into the world; and this when a member of Queen's College, Oxford, he had actually in his desk two highly and abjured the errors of the Church finished plays, the fruit of his matured of Rome. The somewhat equivocal powers. When we look minutely at glory of turning, for a short time, a the pieces themselves, we find in every good-for-nothing Papist into a good- part of them reason to suspect the acfor-nothing Protestant is ascribed to curacy of Wycherley's statement. In Bishop Barlow. the first scene of Love in a Wood, to go no further, we find many passages which he could not have written when he was nineteen. There is an allusion to gentlemen's periwigs, which first came into fashion in 1663; an allusion to guineas, which were first struck in 1663; an allusion to the vests which Charles ordered to be worn at court in 1666; an allusion to the fire of 1666; and several political allusions which must be assigned to times later than the year of the Restoration, to times when the government and the city were opposed to each other, and when the Presbyterian ministers had been driven from the parish churches to the conventicles. But it is needless to dwell on particular expressions. The whole air and spirit of the piece belong to a period subsequent to that mentioned by Wycherley. As to the Plain Dealer, which is said to have been written when he was twenty-five, it contains one scene unquestionably written after 1675, several which are later than 1668, and scarcely a line which can have been composed before the end of 1666.

From an early age he had been in the habit of amusing himself by writing. Some wretched lines of his on the Restoration are still extant. Had he devoted himself to the making of verses, he would have been nearly as far below Tate and Blackmore as Tate and Blackmore are below Dryden. His only chance for renown would have been that he might have occupied a niche in a satire, between Flecknoe and Settle. There was, however, another kind of composition in which his talents and acquirements qualified him to succeed; and to that he judiciously betook himself.

In his old age he used to say that he wrote Love in a Wood at nineteen, the Gentleman Dancing-Master at twentyone, the Plain Dealer at twenty-five, and the Country Wife at one or two Whatever may have been the age at and thirty. We are incredulous, we which Wycherley composed his plays, own, as to the truth of this story. it is certain that he did not bring them Nothing that we know of Wycherley before the public till he was upwards leads us to think him incapable of sa- of thirty. In 1672, Love in a Wood crificing truth to vanity. And his was acted with more success than it memory in the decline of his life deserved, and this event produced a played him such strange tricks that great change in the fortunes of the we might question the correctness of The Duchess of Cleveland his assertion without throwing any cast her eyes upon him, and was imputation on his veracity. It is cer- pleased with his appearance. This tain that none of his plays was acted abandoned woman, not content with till 1672, when he gave Love in a her complaisant husband and her royal Wood to the public. It seems impro- keeper, lavished her fondness on a bable that he should resolve, on so im- crowd of paramours of all ranks, from portant an occasion as that of a first dukes to rope-dancers. In the time of appearance before the world, to run the commonwealth she commenced her his chance with a feeble piece, written | career of gallantry, and terminated it

author.

under Anne, by marrying, when a chambers in the Temple, disguised great-grandmother, that worthless fop, like a country girl, with a straw hat Beau Fielding. It is not strange that on her head, pattens on her feet, and she should have regarded Wycherley a basket in her hand. The poet was with favour. His figure was com- indeed too happy and proud to be dismanding, his countenance strikingly creet. He dedicated to the Duchess handsome, his look and deportment the play which had led to their acfull of grace and dignity. He had, as quaintance, and in the dedication exPope said long after, "the true noble-pressed himself in terms which could man look," the look which seems to in- not but confirm the reports which had dicate superiority, and a not unbe- gone abroad. But at Whitehall such coming consciousness of superiority. an affair was regarded in no serious His hair indeed, as he says in one of light. The lady was not afraid to his poems, was prematurely grey. But bring Wycherley to court, and to inin that age of periwigs this misfortune troduce him to a splendid society, with was of little importance. The Duchess which, as far as appears, he had never admired him, and proceeded to make before mixed. The easy king, who love to him, after the fashion of the allowed to his mistresses the same coarse-minded and shameless circle to liberty which he claimed for himself, which she belonged. In the Ring, was pleased with the conversation and when the crowd of beauties and fine manners of his new rival. So high gentlemen was thickest, she put her did Wycherley stand in the royal head out of her coach-window, and favour that once, when he was confined bawled to him, "Sir, you are a rascal; by a fever to his lodgings in Bow you are a villain ;" and, if she is not Street, Charles, who, with all his faults, belied, she added another phrase of was certainly a man of social and abuse which we will not quote, but of affable disposition, called on him, sat which we may say that it might most by his bed, advised him to try change justly have been applied to her own of air, and gave him a handsome sum of children. Wycherley called on her money to defray the expense of a jourGrace the next day, and with great ney. Buckingham, then Master of the humility begged to know in what way Horse, and one of that infamous ministry he had been so unfortunate as to dis- known by the name of the Cabal, had oblige her. Thus began an intimacy been one of the Duchess's innumerable from which the poet probably expected paramours. He at first showed some wealth and honours. Nor were such symptoms of jealousy; but he soon, expectations unreasonable. A hand- after his fashion, veered round from some young fellow about the court, anger to fondness, and gave Wycherley known by the name of Jack Churchill a commission in his own regiment was, about the same time, so lucky as and a place in the royal household. to become the object of a short-lived fancy of the Duchess. She had presented him with four thousand five hundred pounds, the price, in all probability, of some title or pardon. The prudent youth had lent the money on high interest and on landed security; and this judicious investment was the beginning of the most splendid private fortune in Europe. Wycherley was not so lucky. The partiality with which the great lady regarded him was indeed the talk of the whole town; and sixty years later old men who remembered those days told Voltaire that she often stole from the court to her lover's

now

It would be unjust to Wycherley's memory not to mention here the only good action, as far as we know, of his whole life. He is said to have made great exertions to obtain the patronage of Buckingham for the illustrious author of Hudibras, who was sinking into an obscure grave, neglected by a nation proud of his genius, and by a court which he had served too well. His Grace consented. to see poor Butler; and an appointment was made. But unhappily two pretty women passed by; the volatile Duke ran after them; the opportunity was lost, and could never be regained.