cynicism, but never over it. There
you have the love of a young age of the world, when young men, hard
hit, could be sharp-tongued, bitter, and often (though not in those
two) too much in earnest not to be shameless. Agree with me, and see
the men who sang and the women they sang of in preposterous stuffed
and starched clothes which made them unapproachable except at the
finger-tips, and yet burning so for each other that by words alone and
the music in them they could rend all the buckram and whalebone and
make such armour vain! You may see in Elizabethan dress a return
to Art, as in Elizabethan poetry you see a return to Learning; but
neither was designed to prevent a return to Nature; rather indeed to
stimulate it. And so you come back to this:

Take thou of me smooth pillows, sweetest bed,
A chamber deaf of noise and blind of light,
A rosy garland and a weary head ...

which is the perfectly-clothed utterance of an Elizabethan longing to
be rid of his clothes.

I don't propose to linger over the perruque. The Restoration was a
time of carnival when, if the men were overdressed, the ladies were
underdressed; and the perruque was a part of the masquerade. In such a
figurehead you could be as licentious as you chose--and you were; you
could only be serious in satire. The perruque accounts for Dryden and
his learned pomp, for Rochester and Sedley, and for Congreve, who told
Voltaire that he desired to be considered as a gentleman rather than
poet, and was with a shrug accepted on that valuation: it accounts for
Timotheus crying Revenge, and not meaning it, or anything else except
display; it accounts for Pepys thinking _King Lear_ ridiculous. Let me
go on rather to the day of the tie-wig, of Pope's Achilles and Diomede
in powder; of Gray awaking the purple year; of Kitty beautiful and
young, of Sir Plume and his clouded cane; of Mason and Horace Walpole.
When ladies were painted, and their lovers in powder, poetry would be
painted too. It would be either for the boudoir or the alcove. I don't
call to mind a single genuine love-song in all that century among
those who dressed _a la mode_. There were, however, some who did not
so dress.

Gray was not one. Whether in the country churchyard, or by the grave
of Horace Walpole's favourite cat, he never lost hold of himself,
never let heart take whip and reins, never drowned the scholar in the
poet, never, in fact, showed himself in his shirtsleeves. But before
he