ABSTRACT
Not all the comedy of the Restoration was played on the stage. Life itself was dazzling and theatrical; it might be a merry farce, but it inclined to a serious realization that destiny-whether honor, love, fortune, Heaven, or Hell-depended on manipulation of the present moment. This preoccupation with immediacy results in the common use of Restoration daily life as material for literature and in frequent attempts to elevate this daily life to an ancient Augustan level or at least to draw moral education from it. History, as Bacon and most analysts of the seventeenth century agreed, included three patterns: chronicles, lives, and narrations. The century was so much in love with diary-writing that Bacon might almost have added it as a pattern: doubtless it is included under lives. Diarists of necessity deal with contemporary material; but at this time biographers and even narrative historians in general limit themselves to the familiar matter of their own day. They are obsessed by the present moment either as a delight or as a warning-sometimes as both.
