to the city, and to the intent to consume their virtue also, lived
dissolute lives; many of their ladies and daughters, to the intent to
maintain themselves according to their dignity, prostituting their
bodies in shameful manner. Ale-houses, dicing-houses, taverns, and
places of iniquity, beyond manner abounding in most places."

Nor is it only in the pages of a puritanical, perhaps a satirical
writer, that we find so shocking and disgusting a picture of the
coarseness of the beginning of the seventeenth century. On the
contrary, in all the comedies of the age, the principal character for
gaiety and wit is a young heir, who has totally altered the
establishment of the father to whom he has succeeded, and, to use the
old simile, who resembles a fountain, which plays off in idleness and
extravagance the wealth which its careful parents painfully had
assembled in hidden reservoirs.

And yet, while that spirit of general extravagance seemed at work over
a whole kingdom, another and very different sort of men were gradually
forming the staid and resolved characters, which afterwards displayed
themselves during the civil wars, and powerfully regulated and
affected the character of the whole English nation, until, rushing
from one extreme to another, they sunk in a gloomy fanaticism the
splendid traces of the reviving fine arts.

From the quotations which I have produced, the selfish and disgusting
conduct of Lord Dalgarno will not perhaps appear overstrained; nor
will the scenes in Whitefriars and places of similar resort seem too
highly coloured. This indeed is far from being the case. It was in
James I.'s reign that vice first appeared affecting the better classes
in its gross and undisguised depravity. The entertainments and