Charles, though fond of wit, though possessed himself of a considerable share of it, though his taste in conversation seems to have been sound and just, served rather to corrupt than improve the poetry and eloquence of his time.

When the theatres were opened at the restoration, and freedom was again given to pleasantry and ingenuity, men, after so long an abstinence, fed on these delicacies with less taste than avidity, and the coarsest and most irregular species of wit was received by the court as well as by the people.

The productions represented at that time on the stage were such monsters of extravagance and folly, so utterly destitute of all reason or even common sense, that they would be the disgrace of English literature, had not the nation made atonement for its former admiration of them by the total oblivion to which they are now condemned.

The duke of Buckingham's Rehearsal, which exposed these wild productions, seems to be a piece of ridicule carried to excess; yet in reality, the copy scarcely equals some of the absurdities which we meet with in the originals.[*] * The duke of Buckingham died on the 16th of April 1688.
This severe satire, together with the good sense of the nation, corrected, after some time, the extravagancies of the fashionable wit; but the productions of literature still wanted much of that correctness and delicacy which we so much admire in the ancients, and in the French writers, their judicious imitators.

It was, indeed, during this period chiefly, that that nation left the English behind them in the productions of poetry, eloquence, history, and other branches of polite letters; and acquired a superiority which the efforts of English writers, during the subsequent age, did more successfully contest with them.