Hudson's Bay Company clerk, an Indian civilian, a captain of a man-
of-war--anything where he could find a purpose and a work. Doubt it
not. How many a Monsieur Thomas of our own days, whom a few years
ago one had rashly fancied capable of nothing higher than coulisses
and cigars, private theatricals and white kid gloves, has been not
only fighting and working like a man, but meditating and writing
homeward like a Christian, through the dull misery of those trenches
at Sevastopol; and has found, amid the Crimean snows, that merciful
fire of God, which could burn the chaff out of his heart and thaw the
crust of cold frivolity into warm and earnest life. And even at such
a youth's worst, reason and conscience alike forbid us to deal out to
him the same measure as we do to the offences of the cool and hoary
profligate, or to the darker and subtler spiritual sins of the false
professor. But if the wrath of God be not unmistakably and
practically revealed from heaven against youthful profligacy and
disobedience in after sorrow and shame of some kind or other, against
what sin is it revealed? It was not left for our age to discover
that the wages of sin is death: but Charles, his players and his
courtiers, refused to see what the very heathen had seen, and so had
to be taught the truth over again by another and a more literal
lesson; and what neither stage-plays nor sermons could teach them,
sharp shot and cold steel did.

'But still the Puritans were barbarians for hating Art altogether.'
The fact was, that they hated what art they saw in England, and that
this was low art, bad art, growing ever lower and worse. If it be
said that Shakspeare's is the very highest art, the answer is, that
what they hated in him was not his high art, but his low art, the
foul and horrible elements which he had in common with his brother
play-writers. True, there is far less of these elements in