wrenched off a knocker, or robbed his master's till to pay his losses
at a betting-office. True; we of this generation can hardly afford
to throw stones. The scapegrace ideal of humanity has enjoyed high
patronage within the last half century; and if Monsieur Thomas seemed
lovely in the eyes of James and Charles, so did Jerry and Corinthian
Tom in those of some of the first gentlemen of England. Better days,
however, have dawned; 'Tom and Jerry,' instead of running three
hundred nights, would be as little endured on the stage as 'Monsieur
Thomas' would be; the heroes who aspire toward that ideal are now
consigned by public opinion to Rhadamanthus and the treadmill; while
if, like Monsieur Thomas, they knocked down their own father, they
would, instead of winning a good wife, be 'cut' by braver and finer
gentlemen than Monsieur Thomas himself: but what does this fact
prove save that England has at last discovered that the Puritan
opinion of this matter (as of some others) was the right one?

There is another aspect in which we must look at the Stuart patronage
of profligate scapegraces on the stage. They would not have been
endured on the stage had they not been very common off it; and if
there had not been, too, in the hearts of spectators some lurking
excuse for them: it requires no great penetration to see what that
excuse must have been. If the Stuart age, aristocracy, and court
were as perfect as some fancy them, such fellows would have been
monstrous in it and inexcusable, probably impossible. But if it was
(as it may be proved to have been) an utterly deboshed, insincere,
decrepit, and decaying age, then one cannot but look on Monsieur
Thomas with something of sympathy as well as pity. Take him as he
stands; he is a fellow of infinite kindliness, wit, spirit, and
courage, but with nothing on which to employ those powers. He would
have done his work admirably in an earnest and enterprising age as a