... The cold heart, and the murderous tongue,
The wintry soul that hates to hear a song,
The close-shut fist, the mean and measuring eye,
And all the little poisoned ways of wrong.

Man's virtues and vices are being subjected to a re-classification, in
the course of which they are entertainingly seen, in no few instances,
to be changing places. The standards of punishment applied by Dante to
his inferno of lost souls is being, every year, more closely
approximated; warm-blooded sins of instinct and impulse, as having
usually some "relish of salvation" in them, are being judged lightly,
when they are accounted sins at all, and the cold-hearted sins of
essential selfishness, the sins of cruelty and calculation and
cowardice, are being nailed up as the real crimes against God and man.
The individual is being allowed more and more to be the judge of his own
actions, and all actions are being estimated more in regard to their
special relation and environment, as the relativity of right and wrong,
that most just of modern conceptions, is becoming understood. The hidden
sins of the pious and respectable are coming disastrously into the
light, and it no longer avails for a man to be a pillar of orthodoxy on
Sundays if he be a pillar of oppression all the rest of the week; while
the negative virtues of abstinence from the common human pleasures go
for less than nothing in a world that no longer regards the theatre, the
race course, and the card table, or even a beautiful woman, as under the
especial wrath of God. No, the Grundy "virtues" are fast disappearing,
and piano legs are once more being worn in their natural nudity. The
general trend is unmistakable and irresistible, and such apparent
contradictions of it as occasionally get into the newspapers are of no
general significance; as when, for example, some exquisitely refined
Irish police officer suppresses a play of genius, or blushingly covers