They could swagger and they could be maudlin. In public they could ...

They could swagger and they could be maudlin.

In public they could be reserved, for they were a slow and wary race, and reserve is at once the defence of the wise and the refuge of the stupid. But cynicism and superciliousness, the stigmata of a beaten age and a waning class, were alien to the hopeful, if anxious, generation which had taken the future into its hands.

In their exuberance and facility, the earlier Victorians, with their flowing and scented hair, gleaming jewellery and resplendent waistcoats, were nearer to the later Elizabethans; they were not ashamed; and, like the Elizabethans, their sense of the worthwhileness of everything-themselves, their age, and their country:

what the Evangelicals

called seriousness ; the Arnoldians, earnestness; Bagehot, most happily, eagerness-overflowed in sentiment and invective, loud laughter, and sudden reproof. Once at Bowood, when Tom Moore was singing, one by one the audience slipped away in sobs; finally, the poet himself broke down and bolted, and the old Marquis was left alone.

We are in an age when, if brides sometimes swooned at the altar, Ministers sometimes wept at the Table; when the sight of an infant school could reduce a civil servant to a passion of tears; and one undergraduate has to prepare another undergraduate for the news that a third under-graduate has doubts about the Blessed Trinity-an age of flashing eyes and curling lips, more easily touched, more easily shocked, more ready to spurn, to flaunt, to admire, and, above all, to preach. A young man brought up in a careful home might have heard, whether delivered or read aloud, a thousand sermons; an active clergyman was a social asset to a rising neighborhood, his popularity a source of spiritual danger to himself.

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