to the errors of high and ardent natures, for the generosity, the tenderness, the chivalrous delicacy, which ennoble appetites into passions, and impart to vice itself a portion of the majesty of virtue.  The excesses of that age remind us of the humours of a gang of footpads, revelling with their favourite beauties at a flash-house.  In the fashionable libertinism there is a hard, cold ferocity, an impudence, a lowness, a dirtiness, which can be paralleled only among the heroes and heroines of that filthy and heartless literature which encouraged it.  One nobleman of great abilities wanders about as a Merry-Andrew.  Another harangues the mob stark naked from a window.  A third lays an ambush to cudgel a man who has offended him.  A knot of gentlemen of high rank and influence combine to push their fortunes at Court by circulating stories intended to ruin an innocent girl, stones which had no foundation, and which, if they had been true, would never have passed the lips of a man of honour.  A dead child is found in the palace, the offspring of some maid of honour by some courtier, or perhaps by Charles himself.  The whole flight of pandars and buffoons pounce upon it, and carry it in triumph to the royal laboratory, where his Majesty, after a brutal jest, dissects it for the amusement of the assembly, and probably of its father among the rest.  The favourite Duchess stamps about Whitehall, cursing and swearing.  The ministers employ their time at the council-board in making mouths at each other and taking off each other’s gestures for the amusement of the King.  The Peers at a conference begin to pommel each other and to tear collars and periwigs.  A speaker in the House of Commons gives offence to the Court.  He is waylaid by a gang of bullies, and his nose is cut to the bone.  This ignominious dissoluteness, or rather, if we may venture to designate it by the only proper word, blackguardism of feeling and manners, could not but spread from private to public life.  The cynical sneers, and epicurean sophistry, which had driven honour and virtue from one part of the character, extended their influence over every other.  The second generation of the statesmen of this reign were worthy pupils of the schools in which they had been trained, of the gaming-table of Grammont, and the tiring-room of Nell.  In no other age could such a trifler as Buckingham have exercised any political influence.  In no other age could the path to power and glory have been thrown open to the manifold infamies of Churchill.

The history of Churchill shows, more clearly perhaps than that of any other individual, the malignity and extent of the corruption which had eaten into the heart of the public morality.  An English gentleman of good family attaches himself to a Prince who has seduced his sister, and accepts rank and wealth as the price of her shame and his own.  He then repays by ingratitude the benefits which he has purchased by ignominy, betrays his patron in a manner which