From changes in theatrical conditions, friends of the drama doubtless found hope for its higher development; but the main source of promise seemed to lie in the patronage of the court. The court of Charles II indeed exerted a greater influence on the drama than any court since or, perhaps, before, but the influence was mainly toward social and political immorality. Patronage rather than public support was relied upon by both dramatists and actors. In consequence, the theatres became servile purveyors to the amusement and taste of the king and his favorites, and blindly partisan adherents of the royal politics. The failure to represent the nation and the consequent loss both in range of artistic impulse and in soundness of moral standards that had characterized the drama in the reigns of the two earlier Stuarts were now greatly intensified. In tragedy, grossness of language and manners had less opportunity than in comedy, but political subserviency had freer play. Political allegory combined with tragedy in plays contemptible as specimens of either species. This unworthy partisanship and this catering to a society mean and corrupt necessarily maimed that branch of the drama supposed to devote itself to heroic and lofty themes. The influences making most for innovation in the poetry and art of the drama came from France, partly owing to the instigation of the court. The character of this French influence, like its sources, differed from time to time, but from 1660 until after the death of Voltaire it was continuous and powerful. In tragedy, shortly after the Restoration, the heroic romances of Calprenède, Scudéry, and others, and the French plays which they had fostered, were the sources and models of much in the English heroic plays. There was constant borrowing and adapting from French romances and tragedies, as from French comedies. The "Cid" had been translated and acted in the reign of Charles I; several other of Corneille's plays were translated before 1670, his subjects and style were often imitated, and toward the end of the century the influence of Racine was marked upon English drama. The French influence on tragedy, however, was less a matter of models than of rules and theory. The English dramatists never in this period got very close to Corneille or Racine, but they were greatly impressed by French criticism and precept. In an age of reason and modernity, English tragedy, like other forms of literature, found its reaction from the crudities of an earlier age and its reform of the excesses of an untrained art in the pseudo-classicism of France.