The History of England, from the Accession of James the Second - Volume 1, Thomas Babington Macaulay [ebook pc reader txt] 📗

/> in truth they lost little by living in rural seclusion. For, even

in the highest ranks, and in those situations which afforded the

greatest facilities for mental improvement, the English women of

that generation were decidedly worse educated than they have been

at any other time since the revival of learning. At an early

period they had studied the masterpieces of ancient genius. In

the present day they seldom bestow much attention on the dead

languages; but they are familiar with the tongue of Pascal and

Moliere, with the tongue of Dante and Tasso, with the tongue of

Goethe and Schiller; nor is there any purer or more graceful

English than that which accomplished women now speak and write.

But, during the latter part of the seventeenth century, the

culture of the female mind seems to have been almost entirely

neglected. If a damsel had the least smattering of literature she

was regarded as a prodigy. Ladies highly born, highly bred, and

naturally quick witted, were unable to write a line in their

mother tongue without solecisms and faults of spelling such as a

charity girl would now be ashamed to commit.170


The explanation may easily be found. Extravagant licentiousness,

the natural effect of extravagant austerity, was now the mode;

and licentiousness had produced its ordinary effect, the moral

and intellectual degradation of women. To their personal beauty,

it was the fashion to pay rude and impudent homage. But the

admiration and desire which they inspired were seldom mingled

with respect, with affection, or with any chivalrous sentiment.

The qualities which fit them to be companions, advisers,

confidential friends, rather repelled than attracted the

libertines of Whitehall. In that court a maid of honour, who

dressed in such a manner as to do full justice to a white bosom,

who ogled significantly, who danced voluptuously, who excelled in

pert repartee, who was not ashamed to romp with Lords of the

Bedchamber and Captains of the Guards, to sing sly verses with

sly expression, or to put on a page's dress for a frolic, was

more likely to be followed and admired, more likely to be

honoured with royal attentions, more likely to win a rich and

noble husband than Jane Grey or Lucy Hutchinson would have been.

In such circumstances the standard of female attainments was

necessarily low; and it was more dangerous to be above that

standard than to be beneath it. Extreme ignorance and frivolity

were thought less unbecoming in a lady than the slightest

tincture of pedantry. Of the too celebrated women whose faces we

still admire on the walls of Hampton Court, few indeed were in

the habit of reading anything more valuable than acrostics,

lampoons, and translations of the Clelia and the Grand Cyrus.


The literary acquirements, even of the accomplished gentlemen of

that generation, seem to have been somewhat less solid and

profound than at an earlier or a later period. Greek learning, at

least, did not flourish among us in the days of Charles the

Second, as it had flourished before the civil war, or as it again

flourished long after the Revolution. There were undoubtedly

scholars to whom the whole Greek literature, from Homer to

Photius, was familiar: but such scholars were to be found almost

exclusively among the clergy resident at the Universities, and

even at the Universities were few, and were not fully

appreciated. At Cambridge it was not thought by any means

necessary that a divine should be able to read the Gospels in the

original.171 Nor was the standard at Oxford higher. When, in the

reign of William the Third, Christ Church rose up as one man to

defend the genuineness of the Epistles of Phalaris, that great

college, then considered as the first seat of philology in the

kingdom, could not muster such a stock of Attic learning as is

now possessed by several youths at every great public school. It

may easily be supposed that a dead language, neglected at the

Universities, was not much studied by men of the world. In a

former age the poetry and eloquence of Greece had been the

delight of Raleigh and Falkland. In a later age the poetry and

eloquence of Greece were the delight of Pitt and Fox, of Windham

and Grenville. But during the latter part of the seventeenth

century there was in England scarcely one eminent statesman who

could read with enjoyment a page of Sophocles or Plato.


Good Latin scholars were numerous. The language of Rome, indeed,

had not altogether lost its imperial prerogatives, and was still,

in many parts of Europe, almost indispensable to a traveller or a

negotiator. To speak it well was therefore a much more common

accomplishment shall in our time; and neither Oxford nor

Cambridge wanted poets who, on a great occasion, could lay at the

foot of the throne happy imitations of the verses in which Virgil

and Ovid had celebrated the greatness of Augustus.


Yet even the Latin was giving way to a younger rival. France

united at that time almost every species of ascendency. Her

military glory was at the height. She had vanquished mighty

coalitions. She had dictated treaties. She had subjugated great

cities and provinces. She had forced the Castilian pride to yield

her the precedence. She had summoned Italian princes to prostrate

themselves at her footstool. Her authority was supreme in all

matters of good breeding, from a duel to a minuet. She determined

how a gentleman's coat must be cut, how long his peruke must be,

whether his heels must be high or low, and whether the lace on

his hat must be broad or narrow. In literature she gave law to

the world. The fame of her great writers filled Europe. No other

country could produce a tragic poet equal to Racine, a comic poet

equal to Moliere, a trifler so agreeable as La Fontaine, a

rhetorician so skilful as Bossuet. The literary glory of Italy

and of Spain had set; that of Germany had not yet dawned. The

genius, therefore, of the eminent men who adorned Paris shone

forth with a splendour which was set off to full advantage by

contrast. France, indeed, had at that time an empire over

mankind, such as even the Roman Republic never attained. For,

when Rome was politically dominant, she was in arts and letters

the humble pupil of Greece. France had, over the surrounding

countries, at once the ascendency which Rome had over Greece, and

the ascendency which Greece had over Rome. French was fast

becoming the universal language, the language of fashionable

society, the language of diplomacy. At several courts princes and

nobles spoke it more accurately and politely than their mother

tongue. In our island there was less of this servility than on

the Continent. Neither our good nor our bad qualities were those

of imitators. Yet even here homage was paid, awkwardly indeed and

sullenly, to the literary supremacy of our neighbours. The

melodious Tuscan, so familiar to the gallants and ladies of the

court of Elizabeth, sank into contempt. A gentleman who quoted

Horace or Terence was considered in good company as a pompous

pedant. But to garnish his conversation with scraps of French was

the best proof which he could give of his parts and

attainments.172 New canons of criticism, new models of style came

into fashion. The quaint ingenuity which had deformed the verses

of Donne, and had been a blemish on those of Cowley, disappeared

from our poetry. Our prose became less majestic, less artfully

involved, less variously musical than that of an earlier age, but

more lucid, more easy, and better fitted for controversy and

narrative. In these changes it is impossible not to recognise the

influence of French precept and of French example. Great masters

of our language, in their most dignified compositions, affected

to use French words, when English words, quite as expressive and

sonorous, were at hand:173 and from France was imported the

tragedy in rhyme, an exotic which, in our soil, drooped, and

speedily died.


It would have been well if our writers had also copied the

decorum which their great French contemporaries, with few

exceptions, preserved; for the profligacy of the English plays,

satires, songs, and novels of that age is a deep blot on our

national fame. The evil may easily be traced to its source. The

wits and the Puritans had never been on friendly terms. There was

no sympathy between the two classes. They looked on the whole

system of human life from different points and in different

lights. The earnest of each was the jest of the other. The

pleasures of each were the torments of the other. To the stern

precisian even the innocent sport of the fancy seemed a crime. To

light and festive natures the solemnity of the zealous brethren

furnished copious matter of ridicule. From the Reformation to the

civil war, almost every writer, gifted with a fine sense of the

ludicrous, had taken some opportunity of assailing the

straighthaired, snuffling, whining saints, who christened their

children out of the Book of Nehemiah, who groaned in spirit at

the sight of Jack in the Green, and who thought it impious to

taste plum porridge on Christmas day. At length a time came when

the laughers began to look grave in their turn. The rigid,

ungainly zealots, after having furnished much good sport during

two generations, rose up in arms, conquered, ruled, and, grimly

smiling, trod down under their feet the whole crowd of mockers.

The wounds inflicted by gay and petulant malice were retaliated

with the gloomy and implacable malice peculiar to bigots who

mistake their own rancour for virtue. The theatres were closed.

The players were flogged. The press was put under the

guardianship of austere licensers. The Muses were banished from

their own favourite haunts, Cambridge and Oxford. Cowly, Crashaw,

and Cleveland were ejected from their fellowships. The young

candidate for academical honours was no longer required to write

Ovidian epistles or Virgilian pastorals, but was strictly

interrogated by a synod of lowering Supralapsarians as to the day

and hour when he experienced the new birth. Such a system was of

course fruitful of hypocrites. Under sober clothing and under

visages composed to the expression of austerity lay hid during

several years the intense desire of license and of revenge. At

length that desire was gratified. The Restoration emancipated

thousands of minds from a yoke which had become insupportable.

The old fight recommenced, but with an animosity altogether new.

It was now not a sportive combat, but a war to the death. The

Roundhead had no better quarter to expect from those whom he had

persecuted than a cruel slavedriver can expect from insurgent

slaves still bearing the marks of his collars and his scourges.


The war between wit and Puritanism soon became a war between wit

and morality. The hostility excited by