The court amusements in those days were of a description perfectly in unison with the tastes and habits of the higher classes, to whom the satire of St. Evremond, upon a similar order of persons in France, might have been, without even a shadow of sarcasm, applied. “You live in a country,” says St. Evremond, writing to Mademoiselle de l’Enclos, “where people have wonderful opportunities of saving their souls: there, vice is almost as opposite to the mode as virtue; sinning passes for ill-breeding, and shocks decency and good manners, almost as _much_ as religion.”[87] The sarcasm was just,—that not what is good or what is bad, but what was considered fashionable, or agreeable, was the rule for those who lived in the great world to observe. Gambling was the passion, intrigue the amusement, of those days of fearful iniquity. The female sex, in all ages responsible for the tone given to morals and manners, were in a state of general depravity during the whole period of Lady Churchill’s youth; and even those who were reputed most virtuous, and held up as patterns to their sex, overlooked, if they did not countenance, the open exhibition of vice within their very homes. The Duchess of Buckingham, “a most virtuous and pious lady in a vicious age and court,”—“lived lovingly and decently with” her husband, the arch-profligate of the time; and though she knew his delinquencies, never noticed them, and had complaisance enough even to entertain his mistresses, and to lodge them in her own house.[88] Queen Katharine, the neglected and insulted wife of Charles the Second, deemed it her conjugal duty to fall down on her knees at his deathbed, and to entreat pardon for her offences. Whereupon the King vouchsafed to answer her, “that she had offended in nothing.”[89] So humbled, so degraded, were the few virtuous female members of the debased English aristocracy; and so slight was that virtue which could bear, in the closest tie, the constant exhibition of vice! That a woman should forgive—that her best interests, her only chance of happiness, consist in a dignified endurance of the worst of evils, a vicious husband—no reasonable being can doubt; but that as a Christian, as a female, she cannot be excused in remaining within the contamination of vice, is not to be disputed. Continental alliances, the exile of the restored Princes during the greater portion of their youth, and the consequent introduction of foreign amusements and foreign manners, to which we must add a yet tottering and unsettled national faith, may account, in a great measure, for this universal corruption. Nor can we suppose the lofty Lady Churchill to have escaped wholly from the pernicious influence of what she must have seen and heard. Masquerading was the rage; and not only in private, or in gay halls or banquet-rooms, but in the streets and alleys, the theatre, and other places of public resort, it was adopted as a diversion, to pass away hours tedious to uneducated minds.