The same influence had touched Thomas Dudley, and Dorothy Dudley
could have written of him as Lucy Hutchinson did of her husband:
"He was as kind a father, as dear a brother, as good a master, as
faithful a friend as the world had." In a time when, for the
Cavalier element, license still ruled and lawless passion was
glorified by every play writer, the Puritan demanded a different
standard, and lived a life of manly purity in strange contrast to
the grossness of the time. Of Hutchinson and Dudley and thousands
of their contemporaries the same record held good: "Neither in
youth nor riper years could the most fair or enticing woman draw
him into unnecessary familiarity or dalliance. Wise and virtuous
women he loved, and delighted in all pure and holy and unblameable
conversation with them, but so as never to excite scandal or
temptation. Scurrilous discourse even among men he abhorred; and
though he sometimes took pleasure in wit and mirth, yet that
which was mixed with impurity he never could endure."

Naturally with such standards life grew orderly and methodical.
"Plain living and high thinking," took the place of high living
and next to no thinking. Heavy drinking was renounced. Sobriety
and self-restraint ruled here as in every other act of life, and
the division between Cavalier and Nonconformist became daily more
and more marked. Persecution had not yet made the gloom and
hardness which soon came to be inseparable from the word Puritan,
and children were still allowed many enjoyments afterward totally
renounced. Milton could write, even after his faith had settled
and matured:

"Haste then, nymph, and bring with thee
Jest and youthful jollity,