love not your unsexed women, spectacled and shrewish, platform declaimers, gorgons of plainness (we are not rude enough to mention ugliness); whose morbid intellectualism scarcely gives compensation for the absence of all lovely qualities. We need not worship beauty idolatrously. We need not be enslaved by sensual passion, or tolerate the companionship of wantons, of the Barbara Palmer type; who are faithless, covetous, and fierce in passion, simply because of knowing they must lose their quicklyfading bloom. The error in the Court of Charles the Second was that physical beauty and unrestraint in speech were prized too highly, amid that bevy of Odalisques, whom Lely painted so delightfully, and whom the Chevalier De Grammont no less pleasantly described. Even among them, gay gipsies as they were, some maidens of unblemished virtue, some matrons not unfit to wear the Fairy Mantle, adorned the circle with their presence. Far away, in many an old hall that still bore trace of the misusage from the Cromwellian Levellers; in many a quiet village cot, where labour brought sound sleep and scanty wages, but content was not unknown; in many a home of station, between poverty and opulence, a steady middle-class that represents our English character the best, in faults and merits,— there were loving hearts, as sound in Charles's days, as at any before or after. This is not the opinion of some conceited AntiStuartists of our time, degenerate weaklings whose digestion is impaired, or who were never fairly hatched, but came into the world without their fur or feathers. According to their illusive showing, the Cavaliers were monsters of depravity; the Roundheads nothing else but saints and heroes. Incapable of loyalty themselves, they cannot understand the loyalty of others. They raise a fetish for us all to worship, and call it Parliament! We dare approach the huge imposture, and find it is a hideous mockery; a lay-figure, stuffed with old prejudices and new perverseness, corrupt within, and far from handsome in externals. We turn from Parliament, pretentious scarecrow, and choose instead the Nation, which it did not represent the men and women of whom we see faint glimpses, if not more, in these our Bagford Ballads. Were we, as some day hence may become our task, now gathering for fresh readers our Anthology of Stuart Times,selecting the choice lyrics of the Cavaliers, the loftiest utterances of their religious faith, of their willing service to the King, their love for female beauty and affection, their cheerfulness, their honourable pride and courage, our work might be much pleasanter than it is here, where (as in the "Drolleries ") we find something of impurity, to excite disgust. What then? Such dainty dilettanteism may well be left to finical small critics, who know the landmarks of all evil. They pounce upon an impropriety in ancient print, as though our present age had followed the advice of Tearsheet Doll to Falstaff, when she irreverently bade him to forswear sack, and patch up his old body for Heaven. He himself, elsewhere, stated a similar intention (carried out, we hope, in unrecorded intervals), that he would "purge and live cleanly, as a gentleman should do." We ballad-lovers take the world much as we find it, glad that it is no worse, and holding it to be much better than the self-elected Saints' own company could make it. Little they know about "Love's Triumph." |