. The literature of all nations and all ages; history, character, and incident . lishmans morality,the brute appears in its violence and deformity. Restorationcomedy, destitute of poetry and romance, gave the Englishan exact picture of ordinary life . . Comedy will give himthe same entertainment as real life, he will wallow equallywell there in vulgarity and lewdness . . filthy words willmake him laugh through sympathy, shameless scenes willdivert him by appealing to his recollections. ... By represent-ing nothing but vice, it authorized their vices. . Rochester 324 I,lTERATUR:e OF AI,!. NATIO
. The literature of all nations and all ages; history, character, and incident . lishmans morality,the brute appears in its violence and deformity. Restorationcomedy, destitute of poetry and romance, gave the Englishan exact picture of ordinary life . . Comedy will give himthe same entertainment as real life, he will wallow equallywell there in vulgarity and lewdness . . filthy words willmake him laugh through sympathy, shameless scenes willdivert him by appealing to his recollections. ... By represent-ing nothing but vice, it authorized their vices. . Rochester 324 I,lTERATUR:e OF AI,!. NATIONS. and diaries II. could quit the theatre edified in their hearts,more convinced than ever that virtue was only a pretence, thepretence of clever rascals who wanted to sell themselves helpless state into which English drama had fallenis effectively illustrated by the absurd tinkering with thegreat plays of Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, andothers, to make them presentable to Restoration was a true poet, the greatest in his day, and must. THE DUKE OE YORKS THEATRE. have scorned public taste and his own humiliating prostra-tion before it, as he condescended to make coarse and clumsytravesties of plays like The Tempest and poems likeParadise lyost, which latter he actually degraded into anacting opera, entitled The State of Innocence. Wycherleyand other dramatists followed suit in mutilating and infectingnoble English plays in the French manner. Tragedies werein more or less demand, but they had to be made of fustianto suit theatres that were schools of gallantry for coarse ENGI^ISH LITERATURE. 325 minds. Antony and Cleopatra was another Shakespeareplay which Dryden made over, and patched up into a newpiece of his own. The restoration of the drama under Charles II, was largelydue to the skillful devices of Sir William Davenant (1605-1669), who succeeded Ben Jonson as poet-laureate. He wrotea large number of plays, poems and masques, but his suc-cess
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