ritans of the Revolution, capable of weeping like
children, and of dying like men, often base courtiers, more than once
true knights, displaying constantly, amidst all these contradictions of
bearing, only the overflowing of nature. Thus prepared, they could 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, stretch