iculate the better, Mr. Pierce spoke:

"That modern times are less romantic and interesting than bygone
centuries is a fallacy. From time immemorial, love and the battle
between evil and good are the two things which have given the world
romance and interest. Every story, whether we find it in the myths of
the East, the folklore of Europe, the poems of the Troubadours, or in
our newspaper of this morning, is based on one or the other of these
factors, or on both combined. Now it is a truism that love never played
so important a part as now in shaping the destinies of men and women,
for this is the only century in which it has obtained even a partial
divorce from worldly and parental influences. Moreover the great battle
of society, to crush wrong and elevate right, was never before so
bravely fought, on so many fields, by so many people as to-day. But
because our lovers and heroes no longer brag to the world of their
doings; no longer stand in the moonlight, and sing of their 'dering
does,' the world assumes that the days of tourneys and guitars were the
only days of true love and noble deeds. Even our professed writers of
romance join in the cry. 'Draw life as it is,' they say. 'We find
nothing in it but mediocrity, selfishness, and money-loving.' By all
means let us have truth in our novels, but there is truth and truth.
Most of New York's firemen presumably sat down at noon to-day to a
dinner of corned-beef and cabbage. But perhaps one of them at the same
moment was fighting his way through smoke and flame, to save life at the
risk of his own. Boiled dinner and burned firemen are equally true. Are
they equally worthy of description? What would the age of chivalry be,
if the chronicles had recorded only the brutality, filthiness and
coarseness of their contemporaries? The wearing of underclothing
unwashed till it fell to pieces; the utter lack of soap; the eating with
fingers; the drunkenness and foul-mouthedness that drove women from the
table at a certain point, and so inaugurated the custom, now continued
merely as an excuse for a cigar? Some one said once that a man finds in
a great city just the qualities he takes to it. That's true of romance
as well. Modern novelists don't find beauty and nobility in life,
because they don't look for them. They predicate from their inner souls
that the world is 'cheap and nasty' and that is what they find it to be.
There is more true romance in a New York tenement than there eve