and mouths were never clean.  The verses they wrote are too foul to transcribe as an illustration of the taste of their composers.  The orgies in which they indulged were not scenes of gaiety, in which buoyant spirits and lively wit might excuse excess, but were serious, bestial, and premeditated.  The dealings of these men with the female sex were but a succession of low intrigues, which destroyed all sentiment and left nothing but disgust behind them.  We hear a great deal about “love” in the literature of the time, but it is the same kind of love that might be found among a herd of cattle.  It would be difficult to mention any man about the court of Charles II who could have appreciated the pure and enduring passion which in the century before had breathed through the noble lines of Spenser’s “Epithalamion,” and in the century that followed inspired “John Anderson, my jo’ John.”  Charles himself, “the old goat,” set an example which hardly needed the authority of the Lord’s anointed to become attractive.  Without honor or virtue himself, and denying their existence in others, he made a fitting leader of the society about him.  His mistresses insulted the queen by their splendor and arrogance, and insulted him by amours with servants and mountebanks.  So destitute of dignity or principle as to share the Duchess of Cleveland with the world, he coolly asked a courtier who was reputed to be on too intimate terms with the queen, how his “mistress” did.  While the gaming-tables at court were nightly covered with gold, and Lady Castlemaine gambled away thousands of pounds at a sitting, the exchequer was closed amid a widespread ruin, and the menial servants about the court were in want of bread.  So openly was the king’s coarse licentiousness pursued, that “the very sentrys speak of it,” that the queen rarely entered her dressing-rooms without first being assured that the king was not there with one of his women.  Such an example had a powerful influence upon all the rank and fashion of the time, already predisposed to a similar course.  The extent of the prevailing reverence for royalty is admirably illustrated by the scene in which the Earl of Arlington advised Miss Stewart concerning her conduct as mistress of the king, to which position “it had pleased God and her virtue to raise her.”  Thus from the popular dislike of Puritanism, and the example of a profligate court, began that reign of social and political corruption which for a hundred years demoralized the manners and sullied the literature of the English people.  The vice which became so engrafted on the habits of private life as to make decency seem an affectation, invaded religion and politics.  To religion it brought about a general indifference, which in the higher ranks of the clergy took effect in disregard of their duties and in a shameless scramble for lucrative posts, and in the lower ranks produced poverty and social degradation.  In politics are to be dated from this reign the gross corruption which enabled every public officer, however high or however low, to use his position for the purpose of private plunder, and the habit of bribing members of Parliament which soon converted them into tools of the crown’s ministers.