He was imprisoned for twelve years and a half; in his dungeon he made wire-snares to support himself and his family; he died at the age of sixty in 1688. At the same time Milton lingered obscure and blind. The last two poets of the Reformation thus survived, amid the classical coldness which then dried up English literature, and the social excess which then corrupted English morals. "Shorn hypocrites, psalm-singers, gloomy bigots," such were the names by which men who reformed the manners and renewed the constitution of England were insulted. But oppressed and insulted as they were, their work continued of itself and without noise underground; for the ideal which they had raised was, after all, that which the clime suggested and the race demanded. Gradually Puritanism began to approach the world, and the world to approach Puritanism. The Restoration was to fall into evil odor, the Revolution was to come, and beneath the gradual progress of national sympathy, as well as under the incessant effort of public reflection, parties and doctrines were to rally around a free and moral Protestantism. [Footnote 1: Roger Ascham, "The Scholemaster" (1570), ed. Arber, 1870, book I., p. 83.] [Footnote 2: See, in "Corinne," Lord Nevil's judgment on the Italians.] [Footnote 3: See "Corpus historicorum medii ævi," G. Eccard, vol. II; Joh. Burchardi, high chamberlain to Alexander VI, "Diarium," p. 2134. Guicciardini, "Dell'istoria d'Italia," p. 211, ed. Panthéon Littéraire.] [Footnote 4: See, in Casanova's "Mémoires," the picture of this degradation. See also the "Mémoires" of Scipione Rossi, on the convents of Tuscany at the close of the eighteenth century.] [Footnote 5: From Homer to Constantine, the ancient city was an association of freemen, whose aim was the conquest and destruction of other freemen.]