The evil example of the court, therefore, produced very little effect upon the morals of the City. At first, indeed, the whole nation, tired to death of grave faces, sober clothes, Puritanic austerity, godly talk, downcast eyes, and the intolerable nuisance of talking and thinking perpetually about the very slender chance of getting into heaven, rushed into a reckless extreme of brave and even gaudy attire and generous feasting, the twang of the guitar no longer prohibited, nor the singing of love ditties, nor the dancing of the youths and maids forbidden. Even this natural reaction affected only the young. The heart of the City was, and remained for a hundred and fifty years afterwards, deeply affected with the Puritanic spirit. It has been of late years the fashion of the day--led by those who wish to saddle us again with sacerdotalism--to scoff and laugh at this spirit. It has nearly disappeared now, even in America; but we may see in it far more than what has been called the selfish desire of each man to save his own soul. We may see in it, especially, the spirit of personal responsibility, the loss of which--if we ever do lose it, should authority be able to reassert her old power--will be fatal to intellectual or moral advance. Personal responsibility brings with it personal dignity, enterprise, courage, patience, all the virtues. Only that man who stands face to face with his Maker, with no authority intervening, can be called free. But when the young men of the City had had their fling, in the first rush and whirlpool of the Restoration, they settled down soberly to business again. The foundation of the Hudson's Bay Company proves that the Elizabethan spirit of enterprise was by no means dead. The Institution of the Royal Society, which had its first home in Gresham College, proves that the City thought of other useful things besides money-getting. The last forty years of the seventeenth century, however, might have been passed over as presenting no special points of change, except in the gradual introduction of tea and coffee. As London was in the time of Elizabeth, so it was, with a few changes, in the time of Charles the Second. A little variation in the costumes; a little alteration in the hour of dinner; a greatly extended trade over a much wider world; and, in all other respects, the same city. Two events--two disasters--give special importance to this period. I mean the Plague and the Fire.