time was wicked, and that to be gay in this life meant hell-fire and
damnation in the next.

Upon this pious person his cousin of Annapolis looked with something not
unlike contempt; for the latter, though he too was a scholar, possessed
the sort of scholarliness which takes into account beauty and the lore
of cosmopolitanism. He may have been religious or he may not have been,
but if religious he demanded something handsome, something stylish, in
his religion, as he did also in his residence, in his wife, his sons,
his daughters, his horses, coaches, dinners, wines, and slaves. He did
things with a flourish, and was not beset by a perpetual consciousness
and fear of hell. He approved of pretty women; he made love to them; he
married them; he was the father of them. His pretty daughters married
men who also admired pretty women, and became the mothers of other
pretty women, who became, in turn, the mothers and grandmothers of the
pretty women of the South to-day.

Your old-time Annapolis gentleman's ideas of a republic were far indeed
from those now current, for he understood perfectly the difference
between a republic and a democracy--a difference which is not now so
well understood. He believed that the people should elect the heads of
the government, but he also believed that these heads should be elected
from his own class, and that, having voted, the people should go about
their business, trusting their betters to run the country as it should
be run.

This, at least, is my picture of the old aristocrats of Maryland,
Virginia, and South Carolina, as conveyed to me by what I have seen of
their houses and possessions and what I have read of their mode of life.
They were the early princes of the Republic and by all odds its most