Then came those days, never to be recalled without a blush, the days of
servitude without loyalty and sensuality without love, of dwarfish
talents and gigantic vices, the paradise of cold hearts and narrow
minds, the golden age of the coward, the bigot, and the slave. The
king cringed to his rival that he might trample on his people, sank
into a viceroy of France, and pocketed, with complacent infamy, her
degrading insults, and her more degrading gold. The caresses of
harlots and the jests of buffoons regulated the policy of the State.
The government had just ability enough to deceive and just religion
enough to persecute. The principles of liberty were the scoff of every
grinning courtier, and the Anathema Maranatha of every fawning dean.
In every high place, worship was paid to Charles and James, Belial and
Moloch; and England propitiated these obscene and cruel idols with the
blood of her best and bravest children. Crime succeeded to crime, and
disgrace to disgrace, till the race, accursed of God and man, was a
second time driven forth, to wander on the face of the earth, and to be
a by-word and a shaking of the head to the nations.

This is vigorous invective, in the style of Cicero against Catiline, or
Junius attacking a duke; it is brilliant rhetoric and scathing satire.
At bottom it has substantial truth, if the attention is fixed on
Whitehall and the scandalous chronicle of its frequenters. It differs
also from much in Macaulay's invectives in being the genuine hot-headed
passion of an ardent reformer only twenty-five years old. It is
substantially true as a picture of the Court at the Restoration:
but in form how extravagant, even of that! Charles II. is Belial;
James is Moloch; and Charles is _propitiated_ by the blood of
Englishmen!--Charles, easy, courteous, good-natured, profligate
Charles. And all this of the age of the _Paradise Lost_ and the
_Morning Hymn_, of Jeremy Taylor, Izaak Walton, Locke, Newton, and
Wren! Watch Macaulay banging on his antithetic drum--"servitude
without loyalty and sensuality without love"--"dwarfish talents and
gigantic vices"--"ability enough to deceive"--"religion enough to
persecute." Every phrase is a superlative; every word has its
contrast; every sentence has its climax. And withal let us admit that
it is tremendously powerful, that no one who ever read it can forget
it, and few even who have read it fail to be tinged with its fury and
contempt. And, th