The great soldier and politician, who had overthrown an ancient dynasty and crushed the seditions of the sects, had increased the commercial prosperity of the three kingdoms. Wealth poured in at all the ports, and was rapidly diffused over the land; internal improvements kept pace with foreign enterprise; and the England which long ago had been too rich to be arbitrarily governed was now again too rich to be kept in durance by the sour-faced hypocrisies of the Puritans. Those lank-haired gentlemen, whose conduct had not quite answered to the self-denying proclamations with which they had begun, were no longer able to persuade the well-to-do citizen, and the high-waged mechanic, and the prosperous farmer, that religion consisted in speaking through the nose and forswearing all innocent enjoyment. The great battle had been fought, and the fruits of it, they thought, were secure. Were people to be debarred from social meetings and merry-makings at Christmas, and junketings at fairs, by act of Parliament? Acts of Parliament would first have been required strong enough to do away with youth and health, and the power of admiring beauty, and the hopes of marriage. [A.D. 1641-49.] The troubles had lasted seven or eight years; and all through that period, and for some time before, while the thick cloud was gathering, all gayety had disappeared from the land. But by the middle of Cromwell's time there was a new generation, in the first flush of youth,--lads and lasses who had been too young to know any thing of the dark days of Laud and Wentworth. They were twenty years of age now. Were they to have no cakes and ale because their elders were so prodigiously virtuous? They had many years of weary restraint and formalism to make up for, and in 1660 the accumulated tide of joyousness and delight burst all barriers. A flood of dancing and revelry, and utter abandonment to happiness, spread over the whole country; and merriest of the dancers, loudest of the revellers, happiest of the emancipated, was the young and brilliant king. Never since the old times of the Feasts of Fools and the gaudy processions of the Carnival had there been such a riotous jubilee as inaugurated the Restoration. The reaction against Puritanism carried the nation almost beyond Christianity and landed it in heathenism again. The saturnalia of Rome were renewed in the banquetings of St. James's. Nothing in those first days of relaxation seemed real. King and courtiers and cavaliers in courtly palaces, and enthusiastic townsfolk and madly loyal husbandmen, seemed like mummers at a play; and it was not till the candles were burned out, and the scenes grew dingy, and daylight poured upon that ghastly imitation of enjoyment, that England came to its sober senses again. Then it saw how false was the parody it had been playing. It had not been happy; it had only been drunk; and already, while Charles was in the gloss of his recovered crown, the second reaction began. Cromwell became respectable by comparison with the sensual debauchee who sold the dignity of his country for a little present enjoyment and soothed the reproaches of his people with a joke. Give us a Man to rule over us, the English said, and not a sayer of witty sayings and a juggler with such sleight of hand. And yet the example of the court was so contagious, and the fashion of enjoyment so wide-spread, that on the surface every thing appeared prosperous and happy. The stern realities of the first recusants had been so travestied by the exaggerated imitation of their successors that no faith was placed in the serious earnestness of man or woman. Frivolity was therefore adopted as a mark of sense; and if the popular literature of a period is to be accepted as a mirror held up to show the time its image, the old English character had undergone a perfect change. Thousands flocked every day to the playhouses to listen to dialogues, and watch the evolvement of plots, where all the laws of decency and honour were held up to ridicule. Comus and his crew, which long ago had held their poetic festival in the pure pages of Milton, were let loose, without the purity or the poetry, in every family circle. And the worst and most disgusting feature of the picture is that those wassailers who were thus the missionaries of vice were persecutors for religion. While one royal brother was leading the revels at Whitehall, surrounded by luxury and immorality as by an atmosphere without which he could not live, the other, as luxurious, but more moodily depraved, listened to the groans of tortured Covenanters at Holyrood House. Charles and James were like the two executioners of Louis the Eleventh: one laughed, and the other groaned, but both were pitilessly cruel.