tely more excusable, but it does not make it any the less a
collapse. Nothing can efface the essential distinction that Puritanism
was one of the world's great efforts after the discovery of the true
order, whereas it was the essence of the Restoration that it involved no
effort at all. It is true that the Restoration was not, as has been
widely assumed, the most immoral epoch of our history. Its vices cannot
compare for a moment in this respect with the monstrous tragedies and
almost suffocating secrecies and villainies of the Court of James I. But
the dram-drinking and nose-slitting of the saturnalia of Charles II.
seem at once more human and more detestable than the passions and
poisons of the Renaissance, much in the same way that a monkey appears
inevitably more human and more detestable than a tiger. Compared with
the Renaissance, there is something Cockney about the Restoration. Not
only was it too indolent for great morality, it was too indolent even
for great art. It lacked that seriousness which is needed even for the
pursuit of pleasure, that discipline which is essential even to a game
of lawn tennis. It would have appeared to Charles II.'s poets quite as
arduous to write "Paradise Lost" as to regain Paradise.

All old and vigorous languages abound in images and metaphors, which,
though lightly and casually used, are in truth poems in themselves, and
poems of a high and striking order. Perhaps no phrase is so terribly
significant as the phrase "killing time." It is a tremendous and
poetical image, the image of a kind of cosmic parricide. There are on
the earth a race of revellers who do, under all their exuberance,
fundamentally regard time as an enemy. Of these were Charles II. and the
men of the Restoration. Whatever may have been their merits, and as we
have said we think that they had merits, they can never have a place
among the great representatives of the joy of life, for they belonged to
those lower epicureans who kill time, as opposed to those higher
epicureans who make time live.

Of a people in this temper Charles II. was the natural and rightful
head. He may have been a pantomime King, but he was a King, and with all
his geniality he let nobody forget it. He was not, indeed, the aimless
flaneur that he has been represented. He was a patient and cunning
politician, who disguised his wisdom under so perfect a mask of folly
that he not only deceived his allies and opponents, but has deceived
almost