We have observed in the earlier works of fiction of the eighteenth century, together with great coarseness of thought and manners, the reflection of a strong moral and reforming tendency. As early as the reign of William III, Parliament had requested the king to issue proclamations to justices of the peace, instructing them to put in execution the neglected laws against open licentiousness.[184] In 1698, Collier published his "Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage," a powerful and effective protest against the depravity of the drama. At about the same time had been formed the Societies for the Reformation of Manners, which energetically attacked the more flagrant forms of crime. "England, bad as she is," wrote Defoe in 1706, "is yet a reforming nation; and the work has made more progress from the court even to the street, than, I believe, any nation in the world can parallel in such a time and in such circumstances." Toward the middle of the century, these tendencies took effect in the Methodist Revival, a movement destined to exert a profound influence on society. Accompanying this revival, or resulting from it, were many important reforms. The corruption of political life gradually diminished. A new patriotism and unselfishness began to appear in public men. A spirit of philanthropy arose which corrected some of the worst social abuses. Under the leadership of the noble John Howard, the prisons, so long the abandoned haunts of squalor, oppression, and misery, were considerably redeemed from their shameful condition. Beau Nash marked the progress of peaceful and law-abiding habits by formally forbidding the wearing of swords wherever his fashionable authority was recognized. In the fiction of the latter half of the eighteenth century is illustrated a gradual transition of morals and taste from the unbridled coarseness of the century's earlier years to the comparative refinement of our own times.