Lee, and the uncivilized Yankee hordes which had invaded the South were equivalent to the followers of the hated Mordred.
From his earliest years, then, Cabell's consciousness was imbued with a sense of the mythic dimension in human affairs. This mythic sense remained with him and profoundly influenced his fiction. Of course, by the time Cabell began writing he had formed a more objective and ironic attitude toward his region's cherished myths. For even in Richmond, the spiritual bastion of the Confederacy, it was sometimes difficult for a boy to match the legend with present-day reality. After all, as Cabell observed in a beautifully written essay entitled "Almost Touching the Confederacy" (Atlantic Monthly, October 1946; collected in Let Me Lie, 1947), "you lived in Richmond; and Richmond was not like Camelot. Richmond was a modern city, with sidewalks and plumbing and gas lights and horse cars.... Damsels in green kirtles and fire-breathing dragons and champions in bright armor did not go up and down the streets of Richmond, but only some hacks and surreys, and oxcarts hauling tobacco...." Moreover, as he grew older he slowly began to realize that his elders did not speak as enthusiastically about the Confederacy and its heroes "when they were just talking to one another in your father's drugstore, or in your mother's dining room at Sunday night supper...." Slowly the youth began to see that his elders were not describing the real Confederacy or the real Richmond.
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