Two considerations must modify our judgment of this disheartening spectacle.  First, the king and his court are not England.  Though our histories are largely filled with the records of kings and soldiers, of intrigues and fighting, these no more express the real life of a people than fever and delirium express a normal manhood.  Though king and court and high society arouse our disgust or pity, records are not wanting to show that private life in England remained honest and pure even in the worst days of the Restoration.  While London society might be entertained by the degenerate poetry of Rochester and the dramas of Dryden and Wycherley, English scholars hailed Milton with delight; and the common people followed Bunyan and Baxter with their tremendous appeal to righteousness and liberty.  Second, the king, with all his pretensions to divine right, remained only a figurehead; and the Anglo-Saxon people, when they tire of one figurehead, have always the will and the power to throw it overboard and choose a better one.  The country was divided into two political parties:  the Whigs, who sought to limit the royal power in the interests of Parliament and the people; and the Tories, who strove to check the growing power of the people in the interests of their hereditary rulers.  Both parties, however, were largely devoted to the Anglican Church; and when James II, after four years of misrule, attempted to establish a national Catholicism by intrigues which aroused the protest of the Pope[171] as well as of Parliament, then Whigs and Tories, Catholics and Protestants, united in England’s last great revolution.

The complete and bloodless Revolution of 1688, which called William of Orange to the throne, was simply the indication of England’s restored health and sanity.  It proclaimed that she had not long forgotten, and could never again forget, the lesson taught her by Puritanism in its hundred years of struggle and sacrifice.  Modern England was firmly established by the Revolution, which was brought about by the excesses of the Restoration.

LITERARY CHARACTERISTICS.  In the literature of the Restoration we note a sudden breaking away from old standards, just as society broke away from the restraints of Puritanism.  Many of the literary men had been driven out of England with Charles and his court, or else had followed their patrons into exile in the days of the Commonwealth.  On their return they renounced old ideals and demanded that English poetry and drama should follow the style to which they had become accustomed in the gayety of Paris.  We read with astonishment in Pepys’s Diary (1660-1669) that he has been to see a play called Midsummer Night’s Dream, but that he will never go again to hear Shakespeare, “for it is the most insipid, ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life.”  And again we read in the diary of Evelyn,—­another writer who reflects with wonderful accuracy the life and spirit of the Restoration,—­“I saw Hamlet