These being the elements of Carlyle’s moral nature, let us look for a moment at the world which he was to test by his “unborrowed principles of conviction.” He came on the scene during the decade of reaction which followed the battle of Waterloo. Official Europe, confounding the ambition of Napoleon with the causes underlying the Revolution, supposed that in crushing one it had destroyed the other. The motto of the Old Régime had been _Privilege_, of the New it was _Merit_. The revived political fashions of the eighteenth century, though cut by such elegant tailors as Metternich, Castlereagh, and Polignac, chafed a generation which had grown used to a freer costume. At any time there yawns between the ideals and the practices of society a discrepancy which provokes the censure of the philosopher and the sarcasm of the cynic; but in a time like the Restoration, when some men consciously repudiated and none sincerely believed the system thrust upon them, the chasm between profession and performance must open wider still, revealing not only the noble failures born of earnest but baffled endeavor, but also all the hideous growths of hypocrisy, of deceptions, insincerities, and intellectual fraud. And in very truth the Old Régime resuscitated by Europe’s oligarchs was doubly condemned,--first, as being unfitted to the new age; and, secondly, as having marked in the eighteenth century, when it flourished, the logical conclusion of a political and social epoch. In 1820 the trunk and main branches of the tree of Feudalism were dead: he was not a wise man who imagined that the still surviving upper branches would long keep green.