ed 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."

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 dis