unt for the revolt of the vices and of that empty recklessness and
horseplay which is sometimes more irritating than any vice. It accounts
also for the return of the virtue of politeness, for that also is a
nameless thing ignored by logical codes. Politeness has indeed about it
something mystical; like religion, it is everywhere understood and
nowhere defined. Charles is not entirely to be despised because, as the
type of this movement, he let himself float upon this new tide of
politeness. There was some moral and social value in his perfection in
little things. He could not keep the Ten Commandments, but he kept the
ten thousand commandments. His name is unconnected with any great acts
of duty or sacrifice, but it is connected with a great many of those
acts of magnanimous politeness, of a kind of dramatic delicacy, which
lie on the dim borderland between morality and art. 'Charles II.,' said
Thackeray, with unerring brevity, 'was a rascal but not a snob.' Unlike
George IV. he was a gentleman, and a gentleman is a man who obeys
strange statutes, not to be found in any moral text-book, and practises
strange virtues nameless from the beginning of the world.

So much may be said and should be said for the Restoration, that it was
the revolt of something human, if only the debris of human nature. But
more cannot be said. It was emphatically a fall and not an ascent, a
recoil and not an advance, a sudden weakness and not a sudden strength.
That the bow of human nature was by Puritanism bent immeasurably too
far, that it overstrained the soul by stretching it to the height of an
almost horrible idealism, makes the collapse of the Restoration
infinitely 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