Tom Killegrew was the last of his cloth; forced and constant jesting becoming less and less appreciated.  As the jesters approached their end, they had more of the moralist and politician in them than of the mountebank.  We may judge of Killegrew’s wit, when we read that one day on his appearance Charles said to his gay companions, “Now we shall hear our faults.”  “No,” replied the jester, “I don’t care to trouble my head with that which all the town talks of."[57] Killegrew must have had fine scope for his sarcasm.  In these times the character of the monarch gave the tone to society, and was reflected in the dramatists.  Thus we find the earnestness of Elizabeth in Shakespeare, the whimsicality of James in Jonson, and the licentiousness of Charles II. in the poets of the Restoration.  The deterioration of men and of humour in the last reign is marked by the fact that ridicule was mostly directed not against vice as in Roman satire, but against undeserved misfortunes.  Even virtue and learning did not afford immunity; Bishop Warburton writes:  “This weapon (in the dissolute times of Charles II.) completed the ruin of the best minister of that age.  The historians tell us that Chancellor Hyde was brought into his Majesty’s contempt by this court argument.  They mimicked his walk and gesture with a fire-shovel and bellows for the mace and purse.”

The indelicacy of which Charles and his companions was guilty, was not of a primitive and ignorant kind, but always of an amatory character, and at the expense of the fair sex; jests formerly so common as to obtain the name of “japes.”  The writers of that day are objectionable not merely for coarseness of this kind, but for the large amount of it, as one artiste in complimentary attire might be tolerated where a crowd of seminude performers could not.  The poems of Sedley and Rochester are as abundant in indelicacy as they are deficient in humour.  The epigram of Sedley to “Julius” gives a more correct idea of his character than of his usual dullness.

     “Thou swearest thou’ll drink no more; kind Heaven send Me such a
     cook or coachman, but no friend.”

Rochester might have produced something good.  His verses have more traces of poetry and humour than we should expect from a man who out of the thirty-four years of his life, was for five of them continually drunk.  He nearly always attunes his harp to the old subject, so as to become hopelessly monotonous.  Inconstancy has great charms for him, and he consequently imputes it also to the ladies—­

  “Womankind more joy discovers
   Making fools, than keeping lovers.”

Again: 

  “Love like other little boys,
   Cries for hearts as they for toys,
   Which when gained, in childish play,
   Wantonly are thrown away.”

He seems to have been oppressed by a disbelief in any kind of good in the world.  His philosophy, whenever he ventured upon any, was sceptical and irreverent.  His best attempt in this direction was a poem “Upon Nothing,” which commences: