by your practices.'[169]

The testimony of George Fox as to England's fashions in 1654, is
very pointed and extremely droll:--Men and women are carried away
with fooleries and vanities; gold and silver upon their backs,[170]
store of ribbands hanging about the waist, knees, and feet--red or
white, black or yellow; women with their gold; their spots on their
faces, noses, cheeks, foreheads; rings on their fingers, cuffs
double, like a butcher's white sleeves; ribbands about their hands,
and three or four gold laces about their clothes; men dressed like
fiddlers' boys or stage players; see them playing at bowls, or
at tables, or at shovel-board, or each one decking his horse with
bunches of ribbands on his head, as the rider hath on his own.
These are gentlemen, and brave fellows, that say pleasures are
lawful, and in their sports they should like wild asses. This is
the generation carried away with pride, arrogancy, lust, gluttony,
and uncleanness; who eat and drink and rise up to play, their eyes
full of adultery, and their bodies of the devil's adorning.[171]
Such quotations from the writings of men of undoubted veracity, and
who lived during that period, might be multiplied to fill a volume.

Is this the regnant hypocrisy and rampant fanaticism which prevailed
in England, and which Southey supposes to have influenced Bunyan
and deranged his sober judgment? It is true that the Protector
and his council discountenanced vice and folly, and that there was
more piety and virtue in the kingdom at that time than it had ever
before witnessed. But it would have been the greatest of miracles,
had the people been suddenly moralized, after having been baptized
in brutality for ages. Not a century had elapsed since the autos
da fe had blazed throughout the country, burning the most pious,