imagination are so subtly seductive--that it is essential to challenge
them. St. Anthony did not mind the devil as a dragon; but the devil as
a siren--ah! how hard St. Anthony had to pray!

Change is apt to present itself first in its unhandsome aspect. You
would much rather hear a lute in the moonlight upon the lawn, and
behold! a coarse plough and a frightful harrow. Yet, so lutes and
lawns begin. You like the smooth music of a silken court, the
picturesque ceremony, the poetic tradition, the perfume, the splendor,
and lo! a troop in jerkin pricking to the fray in horrible earnest,
and blood, and ghastly wounds, and torture, and merciful death! Yet,
so courts and ceremonies are instituted. One of the hardest battles
that reform has to fight is this battle in the air--so to speak: this
contest with taste and imagination that cling to the myriad-hued moss
and the delicate vine fringe upon the ogre's castle, and that find the
donjon so much more picturesque than the house.

A cause is seen through its pioneers, and taste and imagination are
confused and confounded in the medium. A nature like Falkland's could
not see liberty clearly even through John Pym--how much less through
nasal psalm-singing butchers and brewers building a scaffold for the
king. So, in our own time, the great question that so sorely rent us
was seen by taste and imagination in the form of delicate,
highly-cultured women, of a superficial tranquil elegance of society,
of patriarchal tradition, of easy knowledge of the world, and the
smooth habit of society upon the one hand; and upon the other, often
in the form of a queer medley of grotesque people, each more
extravagant than the other, and uttering the wildest sentiments in the
most absurd rhetoric. The Lady Cavaliere has not forgotten that the
last retreat of the doomed system was the salon and the boudoir, where