is Whitehall or York
House collection as follows: "Ordered, that all such pictures and
statues there as are without any superstition, shall be forthwith
sold.... Ordered, that all such pictures there as have the
representation of the Second Person in the Trinity upon them, shall be
forthwith burnt. Ordered, that all such pictures there as have the
representation of the Virgin Mary upon them, shall be forthwith burnt."
There we have the weak side of our parliamentary government and our
serious middle class. We are incapable of sending Mr. Gladstone to be
tried at the Old Bailey because he proclaims his antipathy to Lord
Beaconsfield. A majority in our House of Commons is incapable of
hailing, with frantic laughter and applause, a string of indecent jests
against Christianity and its Founder. But we are not, or were not
incapable of producing a Parliament which burns or sells the
masterpieces of Italian art. And one may surely say of such a Puritan
Parliament, and of those who determine its line for it, that they had
not the spirit of beauty.

What shall we say of amenity? Milton was born a humanist, but the
Puritan temper, as we know, mastered him. There is nothing more unlovely
and unamiable than Milton the Puritan disputant. Some one answers his
_Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce_. "I mean not," rejoins Milton, "to
dispute philosophy with this pork, who never read any." However, he does
reply to him, and throughout the reply Milton's great joke is, that his
adversary, who was anonymous, is a serving-man. "Finally, he winds up
his text with much doubt and trepidation; for it may be his trenchers
were not scraped, and that which never yet afforded corn of favor to his
noddle--the salt-cellar--was not rubbed; and therefore, in this haste,
easily granting that his answers fall foul upon each other, and praying
you would not think he writes as a prophet, but as a man, he runs to the
black jack, fills his flagon, spreads the table, and serves up
dinner."[473] There you have the same spirit of urbanity and amenity, as
much of it, and as little, as generally informs the religious
controversies of our Puritan middle class to this day.

But Mr. Goldwin Smith[474] insists, and picks out his own exemplar of
the Puritan type of life and manners; and even here let us follow him.
He picks out the most favorable specimen he can find,--Colonel
Hutchinson,[475] whose well-known memoirs, written by his widow, we have
all read with int