and consider them for what they are: unapproachably beautiful,
passionate, serious, on the edge of 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