frequentation of this great
division of English society produce in others, the want of elasticity
and the chronic ennui which characterize this class itself, petrified in
a narrow Protestantism and in a perpetual reading of the Bible."

You know the French;--a little more Biblism, one may take leave to say,
would do them no harm. But an audience like this--and here, as I said,
is the advantage of an audience like this--will have no difficulty in
admitting the amount of truth which there is in the Frenchman's picture.
It is the picture of a class which, driven by its sense for the power of
conduct, in the beginning of the seventeenth century entered,--as I have
more than once said, and as I may more than once have occasion in future
to say,--_entered the prison of Puritanism, and had the key turned upon
its spirit there for two hundred years_.[471] They did not know, good
and earnest people as they were, that to the building up of human life
there belong all those other powers also,--the power of intellect and
knowledge, the power of beauty, the power of social life and manners.
And something, by what they became, they gained, and the whole nation
with them; they deepened and fixed for this nation the sense of conduct.
But they created a type of life and manners, of which they themselves,
indeed, are slow to recognize the faults, but which is fatally condemned
by its hideousness, its immense ennui, and against which the instinct of
self-preservation in humanity rebels.

Partisans fight against facts in vain. Mr. Goldwin Smith,[472] a writer
of eloquence and power, although too prone to acerbity, is a partisan of
the Puritans, and of the nonconformists who are the special inheritors
of the Puritan tradition. He angrily resents the imputation upon that
Puritan type of life, by which the life of our serious middle class has
been formed, that it was doomed to hideousness, to immense ennui. He
protests that it had beauty, amenity, accomplishment. Let us go to
facts. Charles the First, who, with all his faults, had the just idea
that art and letters are great civilizers, made, as you know, a famous
collection of pictures,--our first National Gallery. It was, I suppose,
the best collection at that time north of the Alps. It contained nine
Raphaels, eleven Correggios, twenty-eight Titians. What became of that
collection? The journals of the House of Commons will tell you. There
you may see the Puritan Parliament disposing of th