for Christmas was kept as a fast, and Good Friday as a feast. The whole poem has rather less of a constructed plot than "Tristram Shandy"; and the strange rhymes--as of _flambeau_ to "damn'd blow"--tickled the merry Cavaliers more than they amuse later generations. What is "topical" in "Hudibras" is, of course, transitory, but much of permanent and brilliant wit remains and is current in quotations: for example, Compound for sins they are inclined to By damning those they have no mind to: Still so perverse and opposite As if they worshipped God for spite. Butler wrote other things, the best is a dialogue in which Puss and Cat mimic the conversations of the lovers in the "heroic" tragedies of the Restoration. [1] All five wrote dramas, but none was a professional playwright. CHAPTER XXV. RESTORATION THEATRE. In England, when the King came to his own again (29 May, 1660) and the reign of the Saints was ended, it was certain that the Theatre also would come to her own. The stage had been bad enough, in verse, taste, and manners, before the doors were closed in 1642. When the dramatic Muse returned, she brought with her, like the man in the parable, seven other devils worse than herself. The morals and tastes of the town and Court were what, after so many years of Puritan sway, they might be expected to be. They are most livelily delineated in the "Diary" of Mr. Pepys; and the drama of the Restoration was their child, and worthy of them. At first the stage was occupied by the older plays of Fletcher, Jonson, and Shirley; no new names of note appear till Dryden's "Wild Gallant" failed in 1663, and Sir George Etherege's "Love in a Tub" prospered in 1664. No age will be content with old plays, the mould and fashion of the time must be exhibited. Pictures of the brutal mirth and the horseplay of triumphant licence, of the flirtations and intrigues of lackeys and lords and ladies, all genteel and witty _à la mode_ of the Court and town as we know them from Pepys and Grammont, were presented. Everything must be "new". As we hear of "the new morality," "the new theology," and so on, so, in "The Rehearsal" (1671), a burlesque by the Duke of Buckingham and other hands, on the plays of the last ten years, the word "new" is constantly reiterated. "You must know this is the new way of writing, and these hard things please forty times better than the old plain way of writing."