Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 3.djvu/619

] indecent of lives, be marks of vulgarity, these are the essentally-distinctive marks of the cavaliers. The puritans, with all their acerbity and intolerance, had a-reverence for sound and Christian principles at the core of their system. Virtue and moral piety were their admiration, however rudely they demonstrated it.

A Yeoman of the Guard.

But the cavaliers gloried in every opposite vice and vulgarity the more because the puritans, whom they thought vulgar, denounced them. We have seen the spirit of private assassination which animated them, and led them to the murder of Dorislaus, the commonwealth ambassador in Holland; of Ascam, its minister at Madrid; of Colonel Lisle, at Lausanne; and their repeated attempts on the life of Cromwell, in pursuance of their avowed doctrine of assassination shown in the tract called "Killing no Murder." This does anything but justify their high claim to the title of men of honour, and finds no parallel in the principles or practices of the puritans of England, though the Scotch covenanters stooped to this base practice in the murder of archbishop Sharpe.

Tradesman and his wife. James II.

Then, as to profane swearing, their conversation, larded with oaths, would have disgraced the most uncouth trooper of to-day. "The new band of wits and fine gentlemen," says Macaulay, "never opened their mouths without uttering a ribaldry of which a porter would now be ashamed; and without calling on their Maker to curse them, sink them, confound them, blast them, and damn them." "No man," says lord Somers, "was accounted a gentleman, or person of any honour, that had not in two hours' sitting invented some new modish oath, or found out the late intrigue between the lord B. and the Lady P., laughed at the fopperies of priests, and made lampoons and drollery on the sacred Scriptures themselves.

Female Costume of the time of Charles II.

As to drinking and gambling, these vices were beyond conception; and the plunder of the people by the cavalier troopers was carried on as if they had been in an enemy's country. We have only to refer to the abandoned character of the women of Charles's court, and amongst the aristocracy, who imitated the monarch in selecting mistresses and even wives from the stage, to remind the reader of the immoral character of the age. As we have already said, any one who would convince himself of the sink of infamy and obscenity which society was then, has only to look at the plays which were acted; at their language, declaimed by women without a blush or any evidence of disgust; plays written even by such men as Dryden. "Whatever our dramatists touched," says Macaulay, "they tainted.

Boot of the time of Charles II.

In their imitations the houses of Calderon's stately and high-spirited Castilian gentlemen became sties of vice, Shakspeare's 'Viola' a procuress, Molière's 'Misanthrope' a ravisher, Molière's 'Agnes' an adulteress. Nothing could be so pure or so heroic but that it became foul and ignoble by transfusion through those foul and ignoble minds." The same writer, making a few exceptions—and a noble one in