entered like a young man into all the lusty experiences of life, every
allurement is known, the sweetness and novelty of things are strong with
him. He plunges into all sensations. "Such were the men of this time,
Raleigh, Essex, Elizabeth, Henry VIII himself, excessive and inconstant,
ready for devotion and for crime, violent in good and evil, heroic with
strange weaknesses, humble with sudden changes of mood, never vile with
premeditation like the roisterers of the Restoration, never rigid on
principle like the Puritans of the Revolution, capable of weeping like
children, and of dying like men, often base courtiers, more than once
true knights, displaying constantly, amidst all these contradictions of
bearing, only the overflowing of nature. Thus prepared, they could take
in everything, sanguinary ferocity and refined generosity, the brutality
of shameless debauchery, and the most divine innocence of love, accept
all the characters, wantons and virgins, princes and mountebanks, pass
quickly from trivial buffoonery to lyrical sublimities, listen
alternately to the quibbles of clowns and the songs of lovers. The drama
even, in order to satisfy the prolixity of their nature, must take all
tongues, pompous, inflated verse, loaded with imagery, and side by side
with this vulgar prose; more than this, it must distort its natural style
and limits, put songs, poetical devices in the discourse of courtiers and
the speeches of statesmen; bring on the stage the fairy world of opera,
as Middleton says, gnomes, nymphs of the land and sea, with their groves
and meadows; compel the gods to descend upon the stage, and hell itself
to furnish its world of marvels. No other theatre is so complicated, for
nowhere else do we find men so complete."

M. Taine heightens this picture in generalizations splashed with
innumerable blood-red details of English life and character. The English
is the most warlike race in Europe, most redoubtable in battle, most
impatient of slavery. "English savages" is what Cellini calls them; and