disgrace to disgrace, till the race, accursed of God and man, was a
second time driven forth, to wander on the face of the earth, and to be
a by-word and a shaking of the head to the nations.


This is vigorous invective, in the style of Cicero against Catiline, or
Junius attacking a duke; it is brilliant rhetoric and scathing satire.
At bottom it has substantial truth, if the attention is fixed on
Whitehall and the scandalous chronicle of its frequenters. It differs
also from much in Macaulay's invectives in being the genuine hot-headed
passion of an ardent reformer only twenty-five years old. It is
substantially true as a picture of the Court at the Restoration:
but in form how extravagant, even of that! Charles II. is Belial;
James is Moloch; and Charles is _propitiated_ by the blood of
Englishmen!--Charles, easy, courteous, good-natured, profligate
Charles. And all this of the age of the _Paradise Lost_ and the
_Morning Hymn_, of Jeremy Taylor, Izaak Walton, Locke, Newton, and
Wren! Watch Macaulay banging on his antithetic drum--"servitude
without loyalty and sensuality without love"--"dwarfish talents and
gigantic vices"--"ability enough to deceive"--"religion enough to
persecute." Every phrase is a superlative; every word has its
contrast; every sentence has its climax. And withal let us admit that
it is tremendously powerful, that no one who ever read it can forget
it, and few even who have read it fail to be tinged with its fury and
contempt. And, though a tissue of superlatives, it bears a solid
truth, and has turned to just thoughts many a young spirit prone to be
fascinated by Charles's good-nature, and impressed with the halo of the
divine consecration of kings.

But the savage sarcasms which are tolerable in a passionate young