The change was not so sudden but that it had begun to appear during the weak rule of the second Cromwell--Richard. But the spontaneousness with which the people welcomed Charles in all the towns through which he passed on his way, and the abandonment and joyousness which spread over the land, signalized one of the most important reactions which have occurred in public sentiment and public morals of any age. Music, dancing, revelry, and license suddenly wrenched the times from all their wonted decorum, and in the flood tide of pleasure and frivolity were borne away many who had long subsisted upon their reputations for peculiar piety. Not only did the leopard who had changed his spots, and the Ethiopian his skin, for political purposes when the Civil War bore the Puritans into power, return to their real markings, but great numbers of those who had sustained their Puritanical professions with greater or lesser degrees of sincerity and earnestness caught the maddening thrill of levity with which the very atmosphere seemed surcharged, and rapidly passed down the gradations of character into recklessness and vice. The Royalists were well prepared for the change from piety to profligacy, and hailed the advent of the light-hearted monarch as a veritable release of souls in prison. During the Commonwealth, the wretchedness of their condition had wrought the widespread depravity which existed among them. The uncertainty of their fortunes and the necessity of often meeting together made them _habitués_ of the taverns, which were the centres for social intercourse; and it may have been thus that the habit of excessive drinking, so prevalent in this period, was contracted. Upon the principle that no one gives serious heed to the doings of a drunkard, abandoned and dissolute habits were looked upon by the Royalist plotters as a safeguard for themselves and a security to their plans: "Come, fill my cup, until it swim With foam that overlooks the brim. Who drinks the deepest? Here's to him. Sobriety and study breeds Suspicion in our acts and deeds; The downright drunkard no man heeds." The very vices, however, which the Royalists acknowledged having been led to cultivate by their "pride, poverty, and passion" were imitated by the baser element among the Puritans when the Cavaliers became triumphant. Those who formerly had boasted that they "would as soon cut a Cavalier's throat as swear an oath, and esteem it a less sin," now assumed the rôle of sinners as complacently as they had previously played the part of saints.