take in everything, sanguinary ferocity and refined generosity, the brutality of shameless debauchery, and the most divine innocence of love, accept all the characters, wantons and virgins, princes and mountebanks, pass quickly from trivial buffoonery to lyrical sublimities, listen alternately to the quibbles of clowns and the songs of lovers.  The drama even, in order to satisfy the prolixity of their nature, must take all tongues, pompous, inflated verse, loaded with imagery, and side by side with this vulgar prose; more than this, it must distort its natural style and limits, put songs, poetical devices in the discourse of courtiers and the speeches of statesmen; bring on the stage the fairy world of opera, as Middleton says, gnomes, nymphs of the land and sea, with their groves and meadows; compel the gods to descend upon the stage, and hell itself to furnish its world of marvels.  No other theatre is so complicated, for nowhere else do we find men so complete.”

M. Taine heightens this picture in generalizations splashed with innumerable blood-red details of English life and character.  The English is the most warlike race in Europe, most redoubtable in battle, most impatient of slavery.  “English savages” is what Cellini calls them; and the great shins of beef with which they fill themselves nourish the force and ferocity of their instincts.  To harden them thoroughly, institutions work in the same groove as nature.  The nation is armed.  Every man is a soldier, bound to have arms according to his condition, to exercise himself on Sundays and holidays.  The State resembles an army; punishments must inspire terror; the idea of war is ever present.  Such instincts, such a history, raises before them with tragic severity the idea of life; death is at hand, wounds, blood, tortures.  The fine purple cloaks, the holiday garments, elsewhere signs of gayety of mind, are stained with blood and bordered with black.  Throughout a stern discipline, the axe ready for every suspicion of treason; “great men, bishops, a chancellor, princes, the king’s relations, queens, a protector kneeling in the straw, sprinkled the Tower with their blood; one after the other they marched past, stretched out their necks; the Duke of Buckingham, Queen Anne Boleyn, Queen Catherine Howard, the Earl of Surrey, Admiral Seymour, the Duke of Somerset, Lady Jane Grey and her husband, the Duke of Northumberland, the Earl of Essex, all on the throne, or on the steps of the throne, in the highest ranks of honor, beauty, youth, genius; of the bright procession nothing is left but senseless trunks, marred by the tender mercies of the executioner.”