EQUALITY. 



489' 



of life and manners, of which they themselves 

 indeed are slow to recognize the faults, but which 

 is fatally condemned by its hideousness, its im- 

 mense ennui, and against which the instinct of 

 self-preservation in humanity rebels. 



Partisans fight against facts in vain. Mr. 

 Goldwin Smith, a writer of eloquence and power, 

 although too prone to acerbity, is a partisan of 

 the Puritans, and of the Nonconformists, who are 

 the special inheritors of the Puritan tradition. 

 He angrily resents the imputation upon that Puri- 

 tan type of life, on which the life of our serious 

 middle class has been formed, that it was doomed 

 to hideousness, to immense ennui. He protests 

 that it had beauty, amenity, accomplishment. Let 

 us go to facts. Charles I., who, with all his faults, 

 had the just idea that art and letters are great 

 civilizers, made, as you know, a famous collection 

 of pictures — our first National Gallery. It was, 

 I suppose, the best collection at that time north 

 of the Alps. It contained nine Raphaels, eleven 

 Correggios, twenty-eight Titians. What became 

 of that collection ? The journals of the House 

 of Commons will tell you. There you may see 

 the Puritan Parliament disposing of this White- 

 hall, or York House, collection, as follows : " Or- 

 dered, that all such pictures and statues there as 

 are without any superstition, shall be forthwith 

 sold. . . . Ordered, that all such pictures there 

 as have the representation of the Second Person 

 in Trinity upon them, shall be forthwith burned. 

 Ordered, that all such pictures there as have the 

 representation of the Virgin Mary upon them, 

 shall be forthwith burned." There we have the 

 weak side of our parliamentary government, and 

 our serious middle class. We are incapable of 

 sending Mr. Gladstone to be tried at the Old 

 Bailey because he proclaims his antipathy to Lord 

 Beaconsfield ; a majority in our House of Com- 

 mons is incapable of hailing, with frantic laughter 

 and applause, a string of indecent jests against 

 Christianity and its founder ; but we are not, or 

 were not, incapable of producing a Parliament 

 which burns or sells the masterpieces of Italian 

 art. And one may surely say of such a Puritan 

 Parliament, and of those who determine its line 

 for it, that they had not the spirit of beauty. 



What shall we say of amenity ? Milton was 

 born a humanist, but the Puritan temper, as we 

 know, mastered him. There is nothing more un- 

 lovely and unamiable than Milton, the Puritan dis- 

 putant. Some one answers his "Doctrine and 

 Discipline of Divorce." " I mean not," rejoins 

 Milton, "to dispute philosophy with this pork, 

 who never read any." However, he does reply to 



him, and throughout the reply Milton's great joke 

 is, that his adversary, who was anonymous, is a 

 serving-man. " Finally, he winds up his text with 

 much doubt and trepidation; for, it may be, his 

 trenchers were not scraped, and that which never 

 yet afforded corn of favor to his noddle — the salt- 

 cellar — was not rubbed ; and, therefore, in this 

 haste, easily granting that his answers fall foul 

 upon each other, and praying you would not 

 think he writes as a prophet, but as a man, he 

 runs to the black jack, fills his flagon, spreads 

 the table, and serves up dinner." There you 

 have the same spirit of urbanity and amenity, as 

 much of it and as little, as generally informs the 

 religious controversies of our Puritan middle 

 class to this day. 



But Mr. Goldwin Smith insists, and picks out 

 his own exemplar of the Puritan type of life and 

 manners, and even here let us follow him. He 

 picks out the most favorable specimen he can 

 find, Colonel Hutchinson, whose well-known me- 

 moirs, written by his widow, we have all read with 

 interest. " Lucy Hutchinson," says Mr. Goldwin 

 Smith, " is painting what she thought a perfect 

 Puritan would be ; and her picture presents to us 

 not a coarse, crop-eared, and snuffling fanatic, 

 but a highly-accomplished, refined, gallant, and 

 most amiable, though religious and seriously- 

 minded gentleman." Let us, I say, in this exam- 

 ple of Mr. Goldwin Smith's own choosing, lay our 

 finger upon the points where this type deflects 

 from the truly humane ideal. Mrs. Hutchinson 

 relates a story which gives us a good notion of 

 what the amiable and accomplished social inter- 

 course, even of a picked Puritan family, was. 

 Her husband was Governor of Nottingham. He 

 had occasion, she says, "to go and break up a 

 private meeting in the cannoneer's chamber ; " 

 and in the cannoneer's chamber " were found 

 some notes concerning paedobaptism, which, be- 

 ing brought into the governor's lodgings, his wife 

 having perused them and compared them with the 

 Scriptures, found not what to say against the 

 truths they asserted concerning the misapplica- 

 tion of that ordinance to infants." Soon after- 

 ward she expectl her confinement, and communi- 

 cates the cannoneer's doubts about paedobaptism 

 to her husband. The fatal cannoneer makes a 

 breach in him too. " Then he bought and read 

 all the eminent treatises on both sides, which, at 

 that time, came thick from the presses, and still 

 was cleared in the error of the pasdobaptists." 

 Finally, Mrs. Hutchinson is confined. Then the 

 governor "invited all the ministers to dinner, and 

 propounded his doubt, and the ground thereof, 



