While the men found their greatest enjoyment and most congenial occupation in drunkenness, duelling, and seduction, it is not to be expected that women should have retained an unappreciated refinement.  Half-naked and ornamented with a profusion of jewels, they look out from the portraits of the time with a sleepy, voluptuous expression, which suggests a lack of intelligence and too great a susceptibility to physical impressions.  Women as we find them in contemporary memoirs, and these most often deal with such as are about the court, are not unfit companions for the men.  We see not a few the willing victims of coarse intrigues, and some even assisting in the degradation of others of their sex.  Many of them swore “good mouth filling oaths,” and the scandal they talked would have shocked the taste as well as the principles of Elizabeth’s time.  In the eighteenth century much coarseness is to be seen in literature and society, but we are constantly meeting with the words “delicacy” and “indelicacy” in their application to social refinement, and it is evident that the ideas of that time on this subject differ from ours only in degree.  Under the Restoration, these words, or the thoughts they represent, had a very insignificant existence.  Public taste inclined to the gross and the sensual, and welcomed as enjoyable, what the present discards as disgusting.  Ladies of the highest rank sat through plays of which the purpose and effect was to degrade their own womanhood, to remove from the minds of the men who sat about and watched their countenances at each new obscenity, whatever respect for the sex might have lingered there.  Some wore masks to hide the blushes which might have been looked for as a drama proceeded, which represented every female character on the stage as little better than an animal, using such reason as she possessed only to further the gratification of her appetites.  Under such conditions there could be no encouragement for maiden modesty, and for old age no crown.

It is usually unfair to judge a community by its theatre, to which an exceptional liberty must always be allowed.  But the drama of the Restoration may be said to reflect with much truth the popular taste.  For the noblest efforts of dramatic genius the student turns by preference to the age of Elizabeth.  There he finds art, beauty, and poetry; there he finds human nature, with its nobility and its littleness, with its virtues and its vices.  The time of Charles II was as narrow in its way as the Puritans had been in theirs, and was as little capable of forming broad and just views of mankind.  The Puritans, if they had had a stage, would have represented man as an embodiment of moral qualities.  The dramatists of the Restoration made him merely a creature subject to animal desires and brutish instincts, which he made no effort to regulate.  “It might, not be easy perhaps,” says Hallam, “to find a scene in any comedy of Charles II’s reign, where one character has the behavior