During the commonwealth, what may be called a drab-colored tint pervaded London life, absorbing the rich many-colored hues which sparkle in the early picturesque history of the old metropolis. The pageantries of the Tudors and Stuarts were at an end; civic processions lost much of their glory; maskings and mummings were expelled from the inns of court; May-day became as prosaic as other days; Christmas was stripped of its holly decorations, and shorn from its holiday revels. The companies' halls were divested of royal arms, and the churches purified from images and popish adornments. But the preceding particulars show that the tinge of the times was not quite so drab as it seems on the pages of some partial and prejudiced writers. London had not the sepulchral look, and commonwealthmen had not the funeral-like aspect commonly attributed to them. They had, as we have seen, their cheerfulness and festivity, their banquets, recreations, and amusements; and, no doubt, in the mansions and houses of the city folk, both Presbyterian and Independent, there was comfort and taste, and pleasure, far different from what would be inferred from the accounts of them given by some, as if they were all starched precisians, a formal and woe-begone race. There was a dash of humor in Cromwell, to many about him quite inconsistent with that lugubriousness so often described as the characteristic of the times. With the suppression of the rude, boisterous, profligate, and vicious amusements of earlier times, there was certainly an improvement of the morals of the people. London was purified from a good deal of pollution by the change. The order, sobriety, and good behavior of the London citizens, during the period that regular government existed under Cromwell, appear in pleasing contrast to the confusion and riots of earlier times. There was a general diffusion of religious instruction, an earnestness in preaching, and an example of reverence for religion, exhibited by those in authority, which could not but operate beneficially. No doubt in London, as elsewhere, there were formalism and hypocrisy; the length of religious services had sometimes an unfavorable influence upon the young; severity and force, too, were unjustifiably employed in controlling public manners; but when all these drawbacks are made, and every other which historical impartiality may demand, there remains in the condition of London in those times, a large amount of genuine virtue and religion.