19th (Easter day).  Up and this day put on my close-kneed coloured suit, which, with new stockings of the colour, with belt and new gilt-handled sword, is very handsome.  To church alone, and after dinner to church again, where the young Scotchman preaching, I slept all the while.  After supper, fell in discourse of dancing, and I find that Ashwell hath a very fine carriage, which makes my wife almost ashamed of herself to see herself so outdone, but to-morrow she begins to learn to dance for a month or two.  So to prayers and to bed.  Will being gone, with my leave, to his father’s this day for a day or two, to take physique these holydays.

23d.  St. George’s day and Coronacion, the King and Court being at Windsor, at the installing of the King of Denmarke by proxy and the Duke of Monmouth....  Spent the evening with my father.  At cards till late, and being at supper, my boy being sent for some mustard to a neat’s tongue, the rogue staid half an houre in the streets, it seems at a bonfire, at which I was very angry, and resolve to beat him to-morrow.

24th.  Up betimes, and with my salt eele went down into the parler and there got my boy and did beat him till I was fain to take breath two or three times, yet for all I am afeard it will make the boy never the better, he is grown so hardened in his tricks, which I am sorry for, he being capable of making a brave man, and is a boy that I and my wife love very well.

SUMMARY OF THE RESTORATION PERIOD.  The chief thing to note in England during the Restoration is the tremendous social reaction from the restraints of Puritanism, which suggests the wide swing of a pendulum from one extreme to the other.  For a generation many natural pleasures had been suppressed; now the theaters were reopened, bull and bear baiting revived, and sports, music, dancing,—­a wild delight in the pleasures and vanities of this world replaced that absorption in “other-worldliness” which characterized the extreme of Puritanism.

In literature the change is no less marked.  From the Elizabethan drama playwrights turned to coarse, evil scenes, which presently disgusted the people and were driven from the stage.  From romance, writers turned to realism; from Italian influence with its exuberance of imagination they turned to France, and learned to repress the emotions, to follow the head rather than the heart, and to write in a clear, concise, formal style, according to set rules.  Poets turned from the noble blank verse of Shakespeare and Milton, from the variety and melody which had characterized English poetry since Chaucer’s day, to the monotonous heroic couplet with its mechanical perfection.