These have full liberty to say all they can in praise of the defeated system; but the historian has no such liberty to state the case against it. If he even asserts that he has counter-facts, but dare not state them, he is at once met with a _præjudicium_. The mere fact of his having ascertained the truth is imputed as a blame to him, in a sort of prudish cant. ‘What a very improper person he must be to like to dabble in such improper books that they must not even be quoted.’ If in self-defence he desperately gives his facts, he only increases the feeling against him, whilst the reactionists, hiding their blushing faces, find in their modesty an excuse for avoiding the truth; if, on the other hand, he content himself with bare assertion, and with indicating the sources from whence his conclusions are drawn, what care the reactionists? They know well that the public will not take the trouble to consult manuscripts, State papers, pamphlets, rare biographies, but will content themselves with ready-made history; and they therefore go on unblushing to republish their old romance, leaving poor truth, after she has been painfully haled up to the well’s mouth, to tumble miserably to the bottom of it again. * * * * * In the face of this danger we will go on to say as much as we dare of the great cause, Puritans _v._ Players, before our readers, trusting to find some of them at least sufficiently unacquainted with the common notions on the point to form a fair decision. * * * * * What those notions are is well known. Very many of her Majesty’s subjects are of opinion that the first half of the seventeenth century (if the Puritans had not interfered and spoilt all) was the most beautiful period of the English nation’s life; that in it the chivalry and ardent piety of the Middle Age were happily combined with modern art and civilisation; that the Puritan hatred of the Court, of stage-plays, of the fashions of the time, was only ‘a scrupulous and fantastical niceness’; barbaric and tasteless, if sincere; if insincere, the basest hypocrisy; that the stage-plays, though coarse, were no worse than Shakspeare, whom everybody reads; and that if the Stuarts patronised the stage they also raised it, and exercised a purifying censorship. And many more who do not go all these lengths with the reactionists, and cannot make up their mind to look to the Stuart reigns either for model churchmen or model courtiers, are still inclined to sneer at the Puritan ‘preciseness,’ and to say lazily, that though, of course, something may have been wrong, yet there was no need to make such a fuss about the matter; and that at all events the Puritans were men of very bad taste.