with toasts bawled over brimming cups, with the noise of feasting, of
gaming and of pleasure. The pages turn to the sound of fiddles. From them
arises the din of an immense Sir Roger de Coverley, in which the dancers
go up and down, interchanging hearts and then all hands round together. In
England at the time a king, however vulgar, was superterrestrial, a lord
was sacro-sanct, a gentleman holy and a lady divine.

The rest of the world was composed of insects, useful, obsequious,
parasitic that swarmed beneath a social order less coarse than that of
Germany, less amiably than that of France, but as dissolute and reckless
as either, a society of macaronis and rouged women, of wits and prodigals,
of dare-devils and fatted calves, a life of low scandals in high places,
of great fortunes thrown into the gutter, of leisurely suppers and sudden
elopements--runaways that had in their favor the poetry of the
post-chaise, pistol-shots through the windows and the dignity of danger--a
life mad but not maudlin, not sober but strong, free from hysteria and
sentimentality, and in which, apart from the bacchanalian London world,
there must have been room, as there always is, for real love and much
sweetness besides, yet which, in its less alluring aspect was very
faithfully followed by colonial New York. Meanwhile the world that made
the pace and kept it, saw it reflected back from boards and books, in
plays and novels, some of which are not now even mentionable. That pace,
set by a boozing sovereign is summarizable in a scene that occurred at the
death-bed of Queen Caroline, when the latter told old George II. to marry
again, while he blubbered: "Non, non, j'aurai des maitresses," and she
retorted, "Ah! mon Dieu! Cela n'empeche pas."[73]

These Germans talked French. It was the fashion, one adopted in servile
homage of the Grand Monarque. At the latter's departure the Regency came.
With the Restoration England turned a moral handspring. With the Regency,
France turned a double one. The Regency was the first act of the
Revolution. The second was Louis Quinze. The third was the Guillotine--a
climax for which great ladies rehearsed that they might die, as they had
lived, with grace.

Moscow, meanwhile, was a bloody sewer, Vienna a reconstruction of the
cities that overhung the Bitter Sea. In Paris were the beginnings of
humanitarianism, the commencements of to-day, preludes quavering and
uncertain, hummed over things intolerably base,