394

HISTOKT OF ENGLAND,

CHAP.

III.

eminent men, who belonged to an earlier and better age,were exempt from the general contagion. The verse ofWaller still breathed the sentiments which had animated amore chivalrous generation. Cowley, distinguished as aloyalist and as a man of letters, raised his voice courageouslyagainst the immorality which disgraced both letters andloyalty. A mightier poet, tried at once by pain, danger,poverty, obloquy and blindness, meditated, undisturbed bythe obscene tumult which raged all around him, a song sosublime and so holy that it would not have misbecome the lipsof those ethereal Virtues whom he saw, with that inner eyewhich no calamity could darken, flinging down on the jasperpavement their crowns of amaranth and gold. The vigorousand fertile genius of Butler, if it did not altogether escapethe prevailing infection, took the disease in.a mild form.But these were men whose minds had been trained in a worldwhich had passed away. They gave place in no long tiirie toa younger generation of wits; and of that generation, fromDryden down to Durfey, the common characteristic washard-hearted, shameless, swaggering licentiousness, at onceinelegant and inhuman. The influence of these writers wasdoubtless noxious, yet less noxious than it would have beenhad they been less depraved. The poison which they admi-nistered was so strong that it was, in no long time, rejectedwith nausea. None of them understood the dangerous artof associating images of unlawful pleasure with all that isendearing and ennobling. None of them was aware that acertain decorum is' essential even to voluptuousness, thatdrapery may be more alluring than exposure, and that theimagination may be far more powerfully moved by delicatehints which impel it to exert itself than by gross descriptionswhich it takes in passively.

The spirit of the Antipuritan reaction pervades almost thewhole polite literature of tho reign of Charles the Second.