men, disencumbers himself lightly of his conscience, and apostrophizes the reign of Charles II. as that "happy, thoughtless age, when king and nobles led purely ornamental lives," we feel our flesh chilled at such a candid avowal of volatility. Surely Hazlitt must have understood that it is precisely the fatal picturesqueness of that period to which we, as moralists, so strenuously object. The courts of the first two Hanoverians were but little better or purer, but they were at least uglier, and we can afford to look with some leniency upon their short-comings. His sacred majesty George II. was hardly, save in the charitable eyes of Bishop Porteus, a shining example of rectitude; but let us rejoice that it never lay in the power of any human being to hint that he was in the smallest degree ornamental.
The Puritan, then, has been wafted into universal esteem by the breath of his great eulogist; but the Cavalier still waits for his historian. Poets and painters and romancers have indeed loved to linger over this warm, impetuous life, so rich in vigor and beauty, so full to the brim of a hardy adventurous joy. Here, they seem to say, far more than in
