played; but now the old plays begin to disgust this refined age, since his Majesty’s being so long abroad.”  Since Shakespeare and the Elizabethans were no longer interesting, literary men began to imitate the French writers, with whose works they had just grown familiar; and here begins the so-called period of French influence, which shows itself in English literature for the next century, instead of the Italian influence which had been dominant since Spenser and the Elizabethans.

One has only to consider for a moment the French writers of this period, Pascal, Bossuet, Fenelon, Malherbe, Corneille, Racine, Moliere,—­all that brilliant company which makes the reign of Louis XIV the Elizabethan Age of French literature,—­to see how far astray the early writers of the Restoration went in their wretched imitation.  When a man takes another for his model, he should copy virtues not vices; but unfortunately many English writers reversed the rule, copying the vices of French comedy without any of its wit or delicacy or abundant ideas.  The poems of Rochester, the plays of Dryden, Wycherley, Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar, all popular in their day, are mostly unreadable.  Milton’s “sons of Belial, flown with insolence and wine,” is a good expression of the vile character of the court writers and of the London theaters for thirty years following the Restoration.  Such work can never satisfy a people, and when Jeremy Collier,[172] in 1698, published a vigorous attack upon the evil plays and the playwrights of the day, all London, tired of the coarseness and excesses of the Restoration, joined the literary revolution, and the corrupt drama was driven from the stage.

With the final rejection of the Restoration drama we reach a crisis in the history of our literature.  The old Elizabethan spirit, with its patriotism, its creative vigor, its love of romance, and the Puritan spirit with its moral earnestness and individualism, were both things of the past; and at first there was nothing to take their places.  Dryden, the greatest writer of the age, voiced a general complaint when he said that in his prose and poetry he was “drawing the outlines” of a new art, but had no teacher to instruct him.  But literature is a progressive art, and soon the writers of the age developed two marked tendencies of their own,—­the tendency to realism, and the tendency to that preciseness and elegance of expression which marks our literature for the next hundred years.

In realism—­that is, the representation of men exactly as they are, the expression of the plain, unvarnished truth without regard to ideals or romance—­the tendency was at first thoroughly bad.  The early Restoration writers sought to paint realistic pictures of a corrupt court and society, and, as we have suggested, they emphasized vices rather than virtues, and gave us coarse, low plays without interest or moral significance.  Like Hobbes, they saw only the externals of man, his body and appetites,