the Puritan opinions on several matters have been justified by time.

On the matter of the stage, the world has certainly come over to
their way of thinking. Few highly educated men now think it worth
while to go to see any play, and that exactly for the same reasons as
the Puritans put forward; and still fewer highly educated men think
it worth while to write plays: finding that since the grosser
excitements of the imagination have become forbidden themes, there is
really very little to write about.

But in the matter of dress and of manners, the Puritan triumph has
been complete. Even their worst enemies have come over to their
side, and the 'whirligig of time has brought about its revenge.'

Most of their canons of taste have become those of all England. High
Churchmen, who still call them Roundheads and Cropped-ears, go about
rounder-headed and closer cropt than they ever went. They held it
more rational to cut the hair to a comfortable length than to wear
effeminate curls down the back. We cut ours much shorter than they
ever did. They held (with the Spaniards, then the finest gentlemen
in the world) that sad, i.e. dark colours, above all black, were the
fittest for all stately and earnest gentlemen. We all, from the
Tractarian to the Anythingarian, are exactly of the same opinion.
They held that lace, perfumes, and jewellery on a man were marks of
unmanly foppishness and vanity. So hold the finest gentlemen in
England now. They thought it equally absurd and sinful for a man to
carry his income on his back, and bedizen himself out in reds, blues,
and greens, ribbons, knots, slashes, and treble quadruple daedalian
ruffs, built up on iron and timber, which have more arches in them
for pride than London Bridge for use. We, if we met such a ruffed