o moral enters. Morality constantly enters into that world,
a sound morality and an unsound morality: the sound morality to be
insulted, derided, associated with everything mean and hateful; the
unsound morality to be set off to every advantage, and inculcated by all
methods, direct and indirect. It is not the fact that none of the
inhabitants of this conventional world feel reverence for sacred
institutions and family ties. Fondlewife, Pinchwife, every person in
short of narrow understanding and disgusting manners, expresses that
reverence strongly. The heroes and heroines, too, have a moral code of
their own, an exceedingly bad one, but not, as Mr. Charles Lamb seems to
think, a code existing only in the imagination of dramatists. It is, on
the contrary, a code actually received and obeyed by great numbers of
people. We need not go to Utopia or Fairyland to find them. They are
near at hand. Every night some of them cheat at the hells in the
Quadrant, and others pace the Piazza in Covent Garden. Without flying to
Nephelococcygia or to the Court of Queen Mab, we can meet with sharpers,
bullies, hardhearted impudent debauchees, and women worthy of such
paramours. The morality of the Country Wife and the Old Bachelor is the
morality, not, as Mr. Charles Lamb maintains, of an unreal world, but of
a world which is a great deal too real. It is the morality, not of a
chaotic people, but of low town-rakes, and of those ladies whom the
newspapers call "dashing Cyprians." And the question is simply this,
whether a man of genius who constantly and systematically endeavors to
make this sort of character attractive, by uniting it with beauty,
grace, dignity, spirit, a high social position, popularity, literature,
wit, taste, knowledge of the world, brilliant success in every
undertaking, does or does not make an ill use of his powers. We own that
we are unable to understand how this question can be answered in any way
but one.

It must, indeed, be acknowledged, in justice to the writers of whom we
have spoken thus severely, that they were, to a great extent, the
creatures of their age. And if it be asked why that age encouraged
immorality which no other age would have tolerated, we have no
hesitation in answering that this great depravation of the national
taste was the effect of the prevalence of Puritanism under the
Commonwealth.

To punish public outrages on morals and religion is unquestionably
within the competence of rulers