This is vigorous invective, in the style of Cicero against Catiline, or Junius attacking a duke; it is brilliant rhetoric and scathing satire. At bottom it has substantial truth, if the attention is fixed on Whitehall and the scandalous chronicle of its frequenters. It differs also from much in Macaulay's invectives in being the genuine hot-headed passion of an ardent reformer only twenty-five years old. It is substantially true as a picture of the Court at the Restoration: but in form how extravagant, even of that! Charles II. is Belial; James is Moloch; and Charles is _propitiated_ by the blood of Englishmen!--Charles, easy, courteous, good-natured, profligate Charles. And all this of the age of the _Paradise Lost_ and the _Morning Hymn_, of Jeremy Taylor, Izaak Walton, Locke, Newton, and Wren! Watch Macaulay banging on his antithetic drum--"servitude without loyalty and sensuality without love"--"dwarfish talents and gigantic vices"--"ability enough to deceive"--"religion enough to persecute." Every phrase is a superlative; every word has its contrast; every sentence has its climax. And withal let us admit that it is tremendously powerful, that no one who ever read it can forget it, and few even who have read it fail to be tinged with its fury and contempt. And, though a tissue of superlatives, it bears a solid truth, and has turned to just thoughts many a young spirit prone to be fascinated by Charles's good-nature, and impressed with the halo of the divine consecration of kings.