We must give the seventeenth century credit for introducing some refinements which undoubtedly had an influence on the position of women. Social customs are useful indices to national character, and daily habits often give the key to the moral standard. As long as coarse feeding and heavy drinking prevailed, there was a barrier to social intercourse between the sexes. When the ale and wine, which had been habitually drunk at every meal, were replaced by coffee and tea, it was an undoubted gain to both health and manners. The taste became more refined, repasts ceased to be orgies unfit for the presence of women. John Evelyn considered the custom of gentlemen leaving ladies to themselves after dinner, or rather of the ladies quitting the gentlemen, as barbarous, and it certainly had its origin in barbarous manners. He would doubtless have been astonished if he could have foreseen that the custom continued in force for more than two hundred years after his time, when regular drinking-bouts had ceased. Evelyn’s complaint of the indelicacy of ladies speaking of gentlemen by their Christian names is a little hypercritical. It was the manners that needed alteration more than the speech. He is shocked to hear such talk as-- “Tom P. was here to-day. I went yesterday to the Cours with Will R., and Harry M. treated me at such a tavern.” Surely what Evelyn calls, with a fine scorn, this “particular idiom” and these “gracefull confidences” were not inconsistent with the character of ladies who consented to be treated at taverns. De Cominges, ambassador from France in the reign of Charles II., observes that-- “excesses in taverns and brothels pass among people of note merely for gallantries, and even women of good condition do not refuse a gallant to accompany him to drink Spanish wine.” It hardly becomes a Frenchman to comment on the coarseness of the English, considering the licentiousness among his own people. In France marriage was a constant subject of satire,[42] and much of the profligacy of our court and society was due to French influence. The French nobility hated the bourgeoisie, and could not forgive them for their higher moral tone.[43]