Hampton Court Classic Reprint PDF Download

Excerpt from The Fair Ladies of Hampton Court The irresponsible gaiety - the sacrificing of everything to the pleasure of the moment - that marked the beginning of the short period during which England endured the restored Stuarts has often been spoken of as a mere natural reaction against the puritanical repression of the Commonwealth period. The point has perhaps been stressed over much. It may be doubted whether the Court life of the Second Charles was anything much more than a local fever; it may be believed that the people as a whole retained something Of men: 54774 in corpora 14710. Samuel Pepys wrote significantly in his diary in 1668 the business of abusing the Puritans begins to grow stale and Of no use, they being the people that, at last, will be found the wisest. Even when quarter of a century of faithlessness and frivolity had done its worst to undermine the stability of the nation it was able to make a quick recovery after the scuttling of James the Second, a saturnine rake who lacked even the superficial attractiveness of his brother. The period of those two reigns, 1660 to 1688, looms almost unduly large in our history. It was one which as a nation we may well look back upon without pride as one in which British prestige reached its nadir; a period the record Of which is marked by little that is noble, by much that was ignoble - and the ignoble was largely connected with the Court and its influence, the noble was something in despite Of it. The study of morbid manifestations may, however, as surely have its sociological value when they appear in the body corporate as pathologically they have when they appear in the individual. This is perhaps in part the reason why the story of the prominent personages about the Merry Monarch's Court has some thing of perennial attraction for many readers. It is a story full Of life and colour, a story of the play of human passions, of pleasure and other forms of self-seeking, of jealousy and intrigue almost without restraint, and Of the various causes that help to make that story a particu larly vivid one. Contemporary pictures, diaries, letters, and memoirs combine to make the years that followed the Restoration the earliest period that we can know with such a degree of intimacy, as enables us at once to visualize and realize men and women as they were. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.