like the logical English utilitarians, they taught the lesson that men’s wants have always been right and their arguments always wrong.  Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men of violence.  We speak of ‘touching’ a man’s heart, but we can do nothing to his head but hit it.  The tyranny of the Puritans over the bodies of men was comparatively a trifle; pikes, bullets, and conflagrations are comparatively a trifle.  Their real tyranny was the tyranny of aggressive reason over the cowed and demoralised human spirit.  Their brooding and raving can be forgiven, can in truth be loved and reverenced, for it is humanity on fire; hatred can be genial, madness can be homely.  The Puritans fell, not because they were fanatics, but because they were rationalists.

When we consider these things, when we remember that Puritanism, which means in our day a moral and almost temperamental attitude, meant in that day a singularly arrogant logical attitude, we shall comprehend a little more the grain of good that lay in the vulgarity and triviality of the Restoration.  The Restoration, of which Charles II. was a pre-eminent type, was in part a revolt of all the chaotic and unclassed parts of human nature, the parts that are left over, and will always be left over, by every rationalistic system of life.  This does not merely account for the revolt of the vices and of that empty recklessness and horseplay which is sometimes more irritating than any vice.  It accounts also for the return of the virtue of politeness, for that also is a nameless thing ignored by logical codes.  Politeness has indeed about it something mystical; like religion, it is everywhere understood and nowhere defined.  Charles is not entirely to be despised because, as the type of this movement, he let himself float upon this new tide of politeness.  There was some moral and social value in his perfection in little things.  He could not keep the Ten Commandments, but he kept the ten thousand commandments.  His name is unconnected with any great acts of duty or sacrifice, but it is connected with a great many of those acts of magnanimous politeness, of a kind of dramatic delicacy, which lie on the dim borderland between morality and art.  ‘Charles II.,’ said Thackeray, with unerring brevity, ‘was a rascal but not a snob.’  Unlike George IV. he was a gentleman, and a gentleman is a man who obeys strange statutes, not to be found in any moral text-book, and practises strange virtues nameless from the beginning of the world.

So much may be said and should be said for the Restoration, that it was the revolt of something human, if only the debris of human nature.  But more cannot be said.  It was emphatically a fall and not an ascent, a recoil and not an advance, a sudden weakness and not a sudden strength.  That the bow of human nature was by Puritanism bent immeasurably too far, that it overstrained the soul by stretching it to the