but not altogether inaccurate, description, the tie-wig symbolizing a certain gentlemanly aloofness from potent and primitive emotions. Religion is a primitive emotion, and the eighteenth century (ce siècle sans âme) was, in polite life, singularly shy of religion; reserving it for the pulpit, and handling it there with the caution due to an explosive. Crabbe, who also lapped over into the nineteenth century, was reproached by his friends for talking about Heaven and Hell in his sermons, "as though he had been a Methodist."
From such indiscretions the tie-wig preserved the eighteenth-century moralists. Addison meditates for a morning in Westminster Abbey, and the outcome of his meditation is that the poets have no monuments, and the monuments no poets. Steele walks the London streets, jostling against vice and misery, and pauses to tell us that a sturdy beggar extracted from him the
