.

18. There is a pretty little story of Alfred de Musset's--"La Mouche,"
which, if the reader cares to glance at it, will save me further trouble
in explaining the disciplinarian authority of mere old-fashioned
politeness, as in some sort protective of higher things. It describes,
with much grace and precision, a state of society by no means
pre-eminently virtuous, or enthusiastically heroic; in which many people
do extremely wrong, and none sublimely right. But as there are heights
of which the achievement is unattempted, there are abysses to which fall
is barred; neither accident nor temptation will make any of the
principal personages swerve from an adopted resolution, or violate an
accepted principle of honor; people are expected as a matter of course
to speak with propriety on occasion, and to wait with patience when they
are bid: those who do wrong, admit it; those who do right don't boast of
it; everybody knows his own mind, and everybody has good manners.

19. Nor must it be forgotten that in the worst days of the
self-indulgence which destroyed the aristocracies of Europe, their
vices, however licentious, were never, in the fatal modern sense,
"unprincipled." The vainest believed in virtue; the vilest respected it.
"Chaque chose avait son nom,"[44] and the severest of English moralists
recognizes the accurate wit, the lofty intellect, and the unfretted
benevolence, which redeemed from vitiated surroundings the circle of
d'Alembert and Marmontel.[45]

I have said, with too slight praise, that the vainest, in those days,
"believed" in virtue. Beautiful and heroic examples of it were always
before them; nor was it without the secret significance attaching to
what may seem the least accidents in the work of a master, that Scott
gave to both his heroines of the age of revolution in England the name
of the queen of the highest order of English chivalry.[46]

20. It is to say little for the types of youth and maid which alone
Scott felt it a joy to imagine, or thought it honorable to portray, that
they act and feel in a sphere where they are never for an instant
liable to any of the weaknesses which disturb the calm, or shake the
resolution, of chastity and courage in a modern novel. Scott lived in a
country and time, when, from highest to lowest, but chiefly in that
dignified and nobly severe[47] middle class to which he himself
belonged, a habit of serene and stainless thought was as natural to the
people as th