344 POPE. 



France, his bonnet in Germany, and his behaviour every 

 where.&quot; But while she laughs at his bungling efforts to 

 make himself a cosmopolite in externals, she hints at the 

 persistency of his inward Anglicism: &quot;He hath neither Latin, 

 French, nor Italian.&quot; In matters of taste the Anglo-Saxon 

 mind seems always to have felt a painful distrust of itself, 

 which it betrays either in an affectation of burly contempt 

 or in a pretence of admiration equally insincere. The 

 young lords who were to make the future court of Charles 

 II. no doubt found in Paris an elegance beside which the 

 homely bluntness of native manners seemed rustic and 

 underbred. They frequented a theatre where propriety 

 was absolute upon the stage, though license had its full 

 swing behind the scenes. They brought home with them 

 to England debauched morals and that urbane discipline of 

 manners which is so agreeable a substitute for discipline 

 of mind. The word &quot; genteel &quot; came back with them, an 

 outward symptom of the inward change. In the last 

 generation, the men whose aim was success in the Other 

 World had wrought a political revolution ; now, those whose 

 ideal was prosperity in This World were to have their turn 

 and to accomplish with their lighter weapons as great a 

 change. Before the end of the seventeenth century John 

 Bull was pretty well persuaded, in a bewildered kind of way, 

 that he had been vulgar, and especially that his efforts in 

 literature showed marks of native vigour, indeed, but of 

 a vigour clownish and uncouth. He began to he ashamed 

 of the provincialism which had given strength, if also 

 something of limitation, to his character. 



Waller, who spent a whole summer in polishing the life 

 out of ten lines to be written in the Tasso of the Duchess 

 of York, expresses the prevailing belief as regarded poetry 

 in the prologue to his &quot;improvement&quot; of the &quot;Maid s 

 Tragedy &quot; of Beaumont and Fletcher. He made the play 

 reasonable, as it was called, and there is a pleasant satire in 

 the fact that it was refused a license because there was an 

 immoral king in it. On the throne, to be sure but on the 

 stage ! Forbid it, decency ! 



