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252 and views. It was not till later that the Puritans succeeded in plucking away flower by flower, and utterly rooting up the religion of the past, and spreading over all the land, as with a grey canopy, that dreary sadness which since then, dispirited and debilitated, has diluted itself to a lukewarm, whining, drowsy pietism. Nor had the kingdom, any more than the religion, in Shakespeare's time, suffered that heavy languid change now known to us as the constitutional form of government, which, however it may have benefited European freedom, has in no way advanced or aided Art.