the popular dislike of Puritanism, and the example of a profligate court, began that reign of social and political corruption which for a hundred years demoralized the manners and sullied the literature of the English people. The vice which became so engrafted on the habits of private life as to make decency seem an affectation, invaded religion and politics. To religion it brought about a general indifference, which in the higher ranks of the clergy took effect in disregard of their duties and in a shameless scramble for lucrative posts, and in the lower ranks produced poverty and social degradation. In politics are to be dated from this reign the gross corruption which enabled every public officer, however high or however low, to use his position for the purpose of private plunder, and the habit of bribing members of Parliament which soon converted them into tools of the crown's ministers. While the men found their greatest enjoyment and most congenial occupation in drunkenness, duelling, and seduction, it is not to be expected that women should have retained an unappreciated refinement. Half-naked and ornamented with a profusion of jewels, they look out from the portraits of the time with a sleepy, voluptuous expression, which suggests a lack of intelligence and too great a susceptibility to physical impressions. Women as we find them in contemporary memoirs, and these most often deal with such as are about the court, are not unfit companions for the men. We see not a few the willing victims of coarse intrigues, and some even assisting in the degradation of others of their sex. Many of them swore "good mouth filling oaths," and the scandal they talked would have shocked the taste as well as the principles of Elizabeth's time. In the eighteenth century much coarseness is to be seen in literature and society, but we are constantly meeting with the words "delicacy" and "indelicacy" in their application to social refinement, and it is evident that the ideas of that time on this subject differ from ours only in degree. Under the Restoration, these words, or the thoughts they represent, had a very insignificant existence. Public taste inclined to the gross and the sensual, and welcomed as enjoyable, what the present discards as disgusting. Ladies of the highest rank sat through plays of which the purpose and effect was to degrade their own womanhood, to remove from the minds of the men who sat about and watched their countenances at each new obscenity, whatever respect for the sex might have lingered there. Some wore masks to hide the blushes which might have been looked for as a drama proceeded, which represented every female character on the stage as little better than an animal, using such reason as she possessed only to further the gratification of her appetites. Under such conditions there could be no encouragement for maiden modesty, and for old age no crown.