turn the sun from
its old course? And what man or what number of men ever stayed that
inexorable process by which the cities of this world grow, are very
strong, fail, and grow again? Indeed, indeed, there is charm in every
period, and only fools and flutterpates do not seek reverently for what
is charming in their own day. No martyrdom, however fine, nor satire,
however splendidly bitter, has changed by a little tittle the known
tendency of things. It is the times that can perfect us, not we the
times, and so let all of us wisely acquiesce. Like the little wired
marionettes, let us acquiesce in the dance.

For behold! The Victorian era comes to its end and the day of sancta
simplicitas is quite ended. The old signs are here and the portents to
warn the seer of life that we are ripe for a new epoch of artifice. Are
not men rattling the dice-box and ladies dipping their fingers in the
rouge-pot? At Rome, in the keenest time of her degringolade, when there
was gambling even in the holy temples, great ladies (does not Lucian
tell us?) did not scruple to squander all they had upon unguents from
Arabia. Nero's mistress and unhappy wife, Poppaea, of shameful
memory, had in her travelling retinue fifteen--or, as some say,
fifty--she-asses, for the sake of their milk, that was thought an
incomparable guard against cosmetics with poison in them. Last century,
too, when life was lived by candle-light, and ethics was but etiquette,
and even art a question of punctilio, women, we know, gave the best
hours of the day to the crafty farding of their faces and the towering
of their coiffures. And men, throwing passion into the wine-bowl to sink
or swim, turned out thought to browse upon the green cloth. Cannot we
even now in our fancy see them, those silent exquisites round the long
table at Brooks's, masked, all of them, 'lest the countenance should
betray feeling,' in quinze masks, through whose eyelets they sat
peeping, peeping, while macao brought them riches or ruin! We can see
them, those silent rascals, sitting there with their cards and their
rouleaux and their wooden money-bowls, long after the dawn had crept
up St. James's and pressed its haggard face against the window of the
little club. Yes, we can raise their ghosts--and, more, we can see
many where a devotion to hazard fully as meek as theirs. In England there
has been a wonderful revival of cards. Baccarat may rival dead faro in
the tale of her devotees. We have all se