Most of their canons of taste have become those of all England. High Churchmen, who still call them Roundheads and Cropped-ears, go about rounder-headed and closer cropt than they ever went. They held it more rational to cut the hair to a comfortable length than to wear effeminate curls down the back. We cut ours much shorter than they ever did. They held (with the Spaniards, then the finest gentlemen in the world) that sad, _i.e._ dark colours, above all black, were the fittest for all stately and earnest gentlemen. We all, from the Tractarian to the Anythingarian, are exactly of the same opinion. They held that lace, perfumes, and jewellery on a man were marks of unmanly foppishness and vanity. So hold the finest gentlemen in England now. They thought it equally absurd and sinful for a man to carry his income on his back, and bedizen himself out in reds, blues, and greens, ribbons, knots, slashes, and treble quadruple dædalian ruffs, built up on iron and timber, which have more arches in them for pride than London Bridge for use. We, if we met such a ruffed and ruffled worthy as used to swagger by dozens up and down Paul’s Walk, not knowing how to get a dinner, much less to pay his tailor, should look on him as firstly a fool, and secondly a swindler: while if we met an old Puritan, we should consider him a man gracefully and picturesquely drest, but withal in the most perfect sobriety of good taste; and when we discovered (as we probably should), over and above, that the harlequin cavalier had a box of salve and a pair of dice in one pocket, a pack of cards and a few pawnbroker’s duplicates in the other; that his thoughts were altogether of citizens’ wives and their too easy virtue; and that he could not open his mouth without a dozen oaths: then we should consider the Puritan (even though he did quote Scripture somewhat through his nose) as the gentleman; and the courtier as a most offensive specimen of the ‘snob triumphant,’ glorying in his shame. The picture is not ours, nor even the Puritan’s. It is Bishop Hall’s, Bishop Earle’s, it is Beaumont’s, Fletcher’s, Jonson’s, Shakspeare’s,—the picture which every dramatist, as well as satirist, has drawn of the ‘gallant’ of the seventeenth century. No one can read those writers honestly without seeing that the Puritan, and not the Cavalier conception of what a British gentleman should be, is the one accepted by the whole nation at this day.