At the Restoration the pendulum swung back again. From the strained morality of the Puritans there was a sudden leap to the most extravagant license and the grossest immorality, with the king and the court in the van. The theaters were thrown wide open, women for the first time went upon the stage, and they acted in plays whose moral tone is so low that they cannot now be presented on the stage or read in the drawing-room. Of course they voiced the social conditions of the time. Marriage ties were lightly regarded; no gallant but boasted his amours. Revelry ran riot; drunkenness became a habit and gambling a craze. The court scintillated with brilliant wits, conscienceless libertines, and scoffing atheists. It was an age of debauchery and disbelief. The splendor of this life sometimes dazzles, the lack of conveniences appalls. The post left London once a week. A journey to the country must be made in your own lumbering carriage, or on the snail-slow stagecoach over miserable roads, beset with highwaymen. The narrow, ill-lighted streets, even of London, could not be traversed safely at night; and ladies, borne to routs and levees in their sedan chairs, were lighted by link-boys, and were carried by stalwart, broad-shouldered bearers who could wield well the staves in a street fight. Such were the conditions of life and society which Dryden found in the last fifty years of the seventeenth century. Strong as were the contrasts in politics and manners during Dryden's lifetime, they were paralleled by contrasts in literature no less marked. Dryden was born in 1631; he died in 1700. In the year of his birth died John Donne, the father of the Metaphysical bards, or Marinists; in the year of his death was born James Thomson, who was to give the first real start to the Romantic movement; while between these two dates lies the period devoted to the development of French Classicism in English literature. At Dryden's birth Ben Jonson was the only one of the great Elizabethan dramatists still living, and of the lesser stars in the same galaxy, Chapman, Massinger, Ford, Webster, and Heywood all died during his boyhood and youth, while Shirley, the last of his line, lingered till 1667. Of the older writers in prose, Selden alone remained; but as Dryden grew to manhood, he had at hand, fresh from the printers, the whole wealth of Commonwealth prose, still somewhat clumsy with Latinism or tainted with Euphuism, but working steadily toward that simple strength and graceful fluency with which he was himself to mark the beginning of modern English prose.