It would be folly to suggest, however, that, conscious though Mr.
Chesterton is of the crimes of history, he has turned history into a
mere series of floggings of criminals. He is for ever laying down the
whip and inviting the criminals to take their seats while he paints
gorgeous portraits of them in all the colours of the rainbow. His praise
of the mighty rhetoricians of the eighteenth century could in some
passages scarcely be more unstinted if he were a Whig of the Whigs. He
cannot but admire the rotund speech and swelling adventures of those
days. If we go farther back, we find him portraying even the Puritans
with a strange splendour of colour:--

They were, above all things, anti-historic, like the Futurists in
Italy; and there was this unconscious greatness about them, that
their very sacrilege was public and solemn, like a sacrament; and
they were ritualists even as iconoclasts. It was, properly
considered, but a very secondary example of their strange and
violent simplicity that one of them, before a mighty mob at
Whitehall, cut off the anointed head of the sacramental man of the
Middle Ages. For another, far away in the western shires, cut down
the thorn of Glastonbury, from which had grown the whole story of
Britain.

This last passage is valuable, not only because it reveals Mr.
Chesterton as a marvellous rhetorician doing the honours of prose to his
enemies, but because it helps to explain the essentially tragic view he
takes of English history. I exaggerated a moment ago when I said that to
Mr. Chesterton English history is the story of the rise of a governing
class. What it really is to him is the story of a thorn-bush cut down by
a Puritan. He has hung all the candles of his faith on the sacred thorn,
like the lights on a Christmas-tree, and lo! it has been cut down and