had occurred so recently; one would have thought the detailed
account of it had been received through some private telephone,
communicating with the King's palace.

As the banquet progressed and the wine flowed more lavishly, the
assembled guests grew less and less circumspect in their general
behavior; they flung themselves full length on their luxurious
couches, in the laziest attitudes, now pulling out handfuls of
flowers from the tall porcelain jars that stood near, and pelting
one another with them for mere idle diversion, . . now summoning the
attendant slaves to refill their wine-cups while they lay lounging
at ease among their heaped-up cushions of silk and embroidery; and
yet with all the voluptuous freedom of their manners, the
picturesque grace that distinguished them was never wholly
destroyed. These young men were dissolute, but not coarse; bold,
but not vulgar; they took their pleasure in a delicately wanton
fashion that was infinitely more dangerous in its influence on the
mind than would have been the gross mirth and broad jesting of a
similar number of uneducated plebeians. The rude licentiousness of
an uncultivated boor has its safety-valve in disgust and
satiety, . . but the soft, enervating sensualism of a trained and
cultured epicurean aristocrat is a moral poison whose effects are
so insidious as to be scarcely felt till all the native nobility
of character has withered, and naught is left of a man but the
shadow-wreck of his former self.

There was nothing repulsive in the half-ironical, half-mischievous
merriment of these patrician revellers; their witticisms were
brilliant and pointed, but never indelicate; and if their darker
passions were roused, and ready to run riot, they showed as yet no