Mardi-Gras is of course a relic of the French and Spanish occupation; but I judge that the religious feature has been pretty well knocked out of it now.  Sir Walter has got the advantage of the gentlemen of the cowl and rosary, and he will stay.  His medieval business, supplemented by the monsters and the oddities, and the pleasant creatures from fairy-land, is finer to look at than the poor fantastic inventions and performances of the reveling rabble of the priest’s day, and serves quite as well, perhaps, to emphasize the day and admonish men that the grace-line between the worldly season and the holy one is reached.

This Mardi-Gras pageant was the exclusive possession of New Orleans until recently.  But now it has spread to Memphis and St. Louis and Baltimore.  It has probably reached its limit.  It is a thing which could hardly exist in the practical North; would certainly last but a very brief time; as brief a time as it would last in London.  For the soul of it is the romantic, not the funny and the grotesque.  Take away the romantic mysteries, the kings and knights and big-sounding titles, and Mardi-Gras would die, down there in the South.  The very feature that keeps it alive in the South—­girly-girly romance—­would kill it in the North or in London.  Puck and Punch, and the press universal, would fall upon it and make merciless fun of it, and its first exhibition would be also its last.

Against the crimes of the French Revolution and of Bonaparte may be set two compensating benefactions:  the Revolution broke the chains of the ANCIEN regime and of the Church, and made of a nation of abject slaves a nation of freemen; and Bonaparte instituted the setting of merit above birth, and also so completely stripped the divinity from royalty, that whereas crowned heads in Europe were gods before, they are only men, since, and can never be gods again, but only figureheads, and answerable for their acts like common clay.  Such benefactions as these compensate the temporary harm which Bonaparte and the Revolution did, and leave the world in debt to them for these great and permanent services to liberty, humanity, and progress.

Then comes Sir Walter Scott with his enchantments, and by his single might checks this wave of progress, and even turns it back; sets the world in love with dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinish forms of religion; with decayed and degraded systems of government; with the sillinesses and emptinesses, sham grandeurs, sham gauds, and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society.  He did measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote.  Most of the world has now outlived good part of these harms, though by no means all of them; but in our South they flourish pretty forcefully still.  Not so forcefully as half a generation ago, perhaps, but still forcefully.  There, the genuine and wholesome civilization of the