retiring in her habits, faithful in her liaisons and friendships,
delicate and refined in her manners and conversations, and eagerly
sought for her wisdom, philosophy, and intellectual ability.

Had she been a Semiramis, a Messalina, an Agrippina, a Catherine II,
or even a Lady Hamilton, the glamor of her exalted political position
might have covered up a multitude of gross, vulgar practices,
cruelties, barbarities, oppressions, crimes, and acts of
misgovernment, and have concealed her spiritual deformity beneath the
grandeur of her splendid public vices and irregularities. The mantle
of royalty and nobility, like dipsomania, excuses a multitude of sins,
hypocrisy, and injustice, and inclines the world to overlook,
disregard, or even condone, what in them is considered small vices,
eccentricities of genius, but which in a private person are magnified
into mountains of viciousness, and call forth an army of well meaning
but inconsistent people to reform them by brute force.

It is time to interpose an impasse to the further spread of this
misapprehension of the nature and consequences of human acts, and to
demonstrate the possibility, in humble walks of life, of virtues worth
cultivating, and to erect models out of those who, while they may be
derelict in their ethical duties, are still worthy of being imitated
in other respects. Our standards and patterns of morality are so high
as to be unattainable, not in the details of the practice of virtue,
but in the personnel of the model. Royal and noble blood permeated
with the odor of sanctity; virtuous statesmanship, or proud political
position attained through the rigid observance of the ethical rules of
personal purity, are nothing to the rank and file, the polloi, who can
never hope to reach those elevations in this world; as well expatiate
upon the virtues of Croesus to a man who will never go beyond his