disingenuousness; Matthew Tindall, some of whose infidel productions were, by a vote of the House of Commons, ordered to be burned by the common hangman; John Toland, the “miserable sophist,” as Swift calls him, whose sceptical writings were ordered to be burned by the Irish Parliament, and who discussed the mysteries of Christianity in coffee-houses and other public places, until at last he wanted a meal of meat, and fell to borrowing a few pence from any one that would lend to him; and John Dryden, with his sometimes Popish, and sometimes latitudinarian creed—a man of splendid talents, but whose writings, while flashing with the highest genius, are often soaked and loathsome with the foulest vice. Macaulay, in reference to a period a few years earlier, writes:—“The profligacy of the English plays, satires, songs, and novels of that age is a deep blot on our national fame. The evil may easily be traced to its source. The wits and the Puritans had never been on friendly terms. From the Reformation to the civil war, almost every writer had taken some opportunity of assailing the straight-haired, snuffling, whining saints, who christened their children out of the Book of Nehemiah, who groaned in the spirit at the sight of Jack in the Green, and who thought it impious to taste plum-porridge on Christmas-day. At length a time came when the laughers began to look grave in their turn. The rigid, ungainly zealots, after having furnished much good sport during two generations, rose up in arms, conquered, ruled, and, grimly smiling, trod down under their feet the whole crowd of mockers. At the Restoration the old fight recommenced, and the war between wit and Puritanism soon became a war between wit and morality. Whatever the canting Roundhead had regarded with reverence was insulted; whatever he had proscribed, was favoured. As he never opened his mouth except in Scriptural phrase, the new breed of wits and fine gentlemen never opened theirs without uttering ribaldry of which a porter would now be ashamed. It is not strange, therefore, that our polite literature, when it revived with the old civil and ecclesiastical polity, should have been profoundly immoral. A few eminent men, who belonged to an earlier and better age, were exempt from the general contagion. The verse of Waller still breathed the sentiments which had animated a more chivalrous generation. Cowley, distinguished as a loyalist and as a man of letters, raised his voice courageously against the immorality which disgraced both letters and loyalty. A mightier poet, tried at once by pain, danger, poverty, obloquy, and blindness, meditated, undisturbed by the obscene tumult which raged all around him, a song so sublime and so holy that it would not have misbecome the lips of those etherial virtues whom he saw, with that inner eye which no calamity could darken, flinging down on the jasper pavement their crowns of amaranth and gold. But these