Quite consistent with this commonsense spirit, as the facts were then interpreted, was the allegiance which Restoration writers rendered to the literature of classical antiquity, an allegiance which has gained for this period and the following half-century, where the same attitude was still more strongly emphasized, the name 'pseudo-classical.' We have before noted that the enthusiasm for Greek and Latin literature which so largely underlay the Renaissance took in Ben Jonson and his followers, in part, the form of a careful imitation of the external technique of the classical writers. In France and Italy at the same time this tendency was still stronger and much more general. The seventeenth century was the great period of French tragedy (Corneille and Racine), which attempted to base itself altogether on classical tragedy. Still more representative, however, were the numerous Italian and French critics, who elaborated a complex system of rules, among them, for tragedy, those of the 'three unities,' which they believed to dominate classic literature. Many of these rules were trivial and absurd, and the insistence of the critics upon them showed an unfortunate inability to grasp the real spirit of the classic, especially of Greek, literature. In all this, English writers and critics of the Restoration period and the next half-century very commonly followed the French and Italians deferentially. Hence it is that the literature of the time is pseudo-classical (false classical) rather than true classical. But this reduction of art to strict order and decorum, it should be clear, was quite in accord with the whole spirit of the time. One particular social institution of the period should be mentioned for its connection with literature, namely the coffee houses, which, introduced about the middle of the century, soon became very popular and influential. They were, in our own idiom, cafés, where men met to sip coffee or chocolate and discuss current topics. Later, in the next century, they often developed into clubs.