The boy's first years were past amidst Geneva bands, heads of lank hair, upturned eyes, nasal psalmody, and sermons three hours long.

Plays and poems, hunting and dancing, were proscribed by the austere discipline of his saintly family.

The fruits of this education became visible, when, from the sullen mansion of Puritan parents, the hotblooded, quickwitted young patrician emerged into the gay and voluptuous London of the Restoration.
The most dissolute cavaliers stood aghast at the dissoluteness of the emancipated precisian.

He early acquired and retained to the last the reputation of being the greatest rake in England.

Of wine indeed he never became the slave; and he used it chiefly for the purpose of making himself the master of his associates.