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CHARLES II
not keep the Ten Commandments, but he kept the ten thousand commandments. His name is unconnected with any great acts of duty or sacrifice, but it is connected with a great many of those acts of magnanimous politeness, of a kind of dramatic delicacy, which lie on the dim borderland between morality and art. 'Charles II.,' said Thackeray, with unerring brevity, 'was a rascal but not a snob.' Unlike George IV. he was a gentleman, and a gentleman is a man who obeys strange statutes, not to be found in any moral text-book, and practises strange virtues nameless from the beginning of the world.
So much may be said and should be said for the Restoration, that it was the revolt of something human, if only the
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