There is another feature in the plays of the seventeenth century, new, as far as we know, alike to English literature and manners; and that is, the apotheosis of Rakes. Let the faults of the Middle Age, or of the Tudors, have been what they may, that class of person was in their time simply an object of disgust. The word which then signified a Rake is, in the ‘Morte d’Arthur’ (temp. Ed. IV.), the foulest term of disgrace which can be cast upon a knight; whilst even up to the latter years of Elizabeth the contempt of parents and elders seems to have been thought a grievous sin. In Italy, even, fountain of all the abominations of the age, respect for the fifth commandment seems to have lingered after all the other nine had been forgotten; we find Castiglione, in his ‘Corteggiano’ (about 1520), regretting the modest and respectful training of the generation which had preceded him; and to judge from facts, the Puritan method of education, stern as it was, was neither more nor less than the method which, a generation before, had been common to Romanist and to Protestant, Puritan and Churchman. But with the Stuart era (perhaps at the end of Elizabeth’s reign) fathers became gradually personages who are to be disobeyed, sucked of their money, fooled, even now and then robbed and beaten, by the young gentlemen of spirit; and the most Christian kings, James and Charles, with their queens and court, sit by to see ruffling and roystering, beating the watch and breaking windows, dicing, drinking, duelling, and profligacy (provided the victim be not a woman of gentle birth), set forth not merely as harmless amusements for young gentlemen, but (as in Beaumont and Fletcher’s play of ‘Monsieur Thomas’) virtues without which a man is despicable. On this point, as on many others, those who have, for ecclesiastical reasons, tried to represent the first half of the seventeenth century as a golden age have been altogether unfair. There is no immorality of the court plays of Charles II.’s time which may not be found in those of Charles I.’s. Sedley and Etherege are not a whit worse, but only more stupid, than Fletcher or Shirley; and Monsieur Thomas is the spiritual father of all Angry lads, Rufflers, Blades, Bullies, Mohocks, Corinthians, and Dandies, down to the last drunken clerk who wrenched off a knocker, or robbed his master’s till to pay his losses at a betting-office. True; we of this generation can hardly afford to throw stones. The scapegrace ideal of humanity has enjoyed high patronage within the last half century; and if Monsieur Thomas seemed lovely in the eyes of James and Charles, so did Jerry and Corinthian Tom in those of some of the first gentlemen of England. Better days, however, have dawned; ‘Tom and Jerry,’ instead of running three hundred nights, would be as little endured on the stage as ‘Monsieur Thomas’ would be; the heroes who aspire toward that ideal are now consigned by public opinion to Rhadamanthus and the treadmill; while