Page:A general history for colleges and high schools (Myers, 1890).djvu/684

618 The Restoration forced Milton into retirement, and the last fourteen years of his life were passed apart from the world. It was during these years that, in loneliness and blindness, he composed the immortal poems Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. The former is the "Epic of Puritanism." All that was truest and grandest in the Puritan character found expression in the moral elevation and religious fervor of this the greatest of Christian poems.

John Bunyan (1628–1688) was a Puritan non-conformist. After the Restoration, he was imprisoned for twelve years in Bedford jail, on account of non-conformity to the established worship. It was during this dreary confinement that he wrote his Pilgrim's Progress, the most admirable allegory in English literature. The habit of the Puritan, from constant study of the Bible, to employ in all forms of discourse its language and imagery, is best illustrated in the pages of this remarkable work.

Reign of Charles the Second (1660–1685).

Punishment of the Regicides.—The monarchy having been restored in the person of Charles II., Parliament extended a general pardon to all who had taken part in the late rebellion, save most of the judges who had condemned Charles I. to the block. Thirteen of these were executed with the revolting cruelty with which treason was then punished, their hearts and bowels being cut out of their living bodies. Others of the regicides were condemned to imprisonment for life. Death had already removed the great leaders of the rebellion, Cromwell, Ireton, and Bradshaw, beyond the reach of Royalist hate; so vengeance was taken upon their bodies. These were dragged from their tombs in Westminster Abbey, hauled to Tyburn in London, and there, on the anniversary of Charles's execution, were hanged, and afterwards beheaded (1661).

The "New Model" is disbanded.—This same Parliament, mindful of how the army had ruled preceding ones, took care to