The gibbet stands by the highways, heads of traitors and criminals grin on the city gates.  Mournful legends multiply, church-yard ghosts, walking spirits.  In the evening, before bedtime, in the vast country houses, in the poor cottages, people talk of the coach which is seen drawn by headless horses, with headless postilions and coachmen.  All this, with unbounded luxury, unbridled debauchery, gloom, and revelry hand in hand.  “A threatening and sombre fog veils their mind like their sky, and joy, like the sun, pierces through it and upon them strongly and at intervals.”  All this riot of passion and frenzy of vigorous life, this madness and sorrow, in which life is a phantom and destiny drives so remorselessly, Taine finds on the stage and in the literature of the period.

To do him justice, he finds something else, something that might give him a hint of the innate soundness of English life in its thousands of sweet homes, something of that great force of moral stability, in the midst of all violence and excess of passion and performance, which makes a nation noble.  “Opposed to this band of tragic figures,” which M. Taine arrays from the dramas, “with their contorted features, brazen fronts, combative attitudes, is a troop (he says) of timid figures, tender before everything, the most graceful and love-worthy whom it has been given to man to depict.  In Shakespeare you will meet them in Miranda, Juliet, Desdemona, Virginia, Ophelia, Cordelia, Imogen; but they abound also in the others; and it is a characteristic of the race to have furnished them, as it is of the drama to have represented them.  By a singular coincidence the women are more of women, the men more of men, here than elsewhere.  The two natures go to its extreme—­in the one to boldness, the spirit of enterprise and resistance, the warlike, imperious, and unpolished character; in the other to sweetness, devotion, patience, inextinguishable affection (hence the happiness and strength of the marriage tie), a thing unknown in distant lands, and in France especially a woman here gives herself without drawing back, and places her glory and duty in obedience, forgiveness, adoration, wishing, and pretending only to be melted and absorbed daily deeper and deeper in him whom she has freely and forever chosen.”  This is an old German instinct.  The soul in this race is at once primitive and serious.  Women are disposed to follow the noble dream called duty.  “Thus, supported by innocence and conscience, they introduce into love a profound and upright sentiment, abjure coquetry, vanity, and flirtation; they do not lie, they are not affected.  When they love they are not tasting a forbidden fruit, but are binding themselves for their whole life.  Thus understood, love becomes almost a holy thing; the spectator no longer wishes to be malicious or to jest; women do not think of their own happiness, but of that of the loved ones; they aim not at pleasure, but at devotion.”