relation of verse to music, but an unfeeling member of the party had struck up “John Brown’s Body,” and his lecture had ended, in the usual serial style, at the most interesting point, without even the promise of a “continuation in our next.”  Finally, however, the singers had sung themselves hoarse in the damp night air, the last “Spanish Cavalier” had been safely restored to his inevitable true-love, and the sound of voices and banjo floated away over the water.  Mr. Pierce’s moment had come.

Some one, and it is unnecessary to mention the sex, had given a sigh, and regretted that nineteenth century life was so prosaic and unromantic.  Clearing his throat, quite as much to pre-empt the pause as to articulate the better, Mr. Pierce spoke: 

“That modern times are less romantic and interesting than bygone centuries is a fallacy.  From time immemorial, love and the battle between evil and good are the two things which have given the world romance and interest.  Every story, whether we find it in the myths of the East, the folklore of Europe, the poems of the Troubadours, or in our newspaper of this morning, is based on one or the other of these factors, or on both combined.  Now it is a truism that love never played so important a part as now in shaping the destinies of men and women, for this is the only century in which it has obtained even a partial divorce from worldly and parental influences.  Moreover the great battle of society, to crush wrong and elevate right, was never before so bravely fought, on so many fields, by so many people as to-day.  But because our lovers and heroes no longer brag to the world of their doings; no longer stand in the moonlight, and sing of their ’dering does,’ the world assumes that the days of tourneys and guitars were the only days of true love and noble deeds.  Even our professed writers of romance join in the cry.  ‘Draw life as it is,’ they say.  ’We find nothing in it but mediocrity, selfishness, and money-loving.’  By all means let us have truth in our novels, but there is truth and truth.  Most of New York’s firemen presumably sat down at noon to-day to a dinner of corned-beef and cabbage.  But perhaps one of them at the same moment was fighting his way through smoke and flame, to save life at the risk of his own.  Boiled dinner and burned firemen are equally true.  Are they equally worthy of description?  What would the age of chivalry be, if the chronicles had recorded only the brutality, filthiness and coarseness of their contemporaries?  The wearing of underclothing unwashed till it fell to pieces; the utter lack of soap; the eating with fingers; the drunkenness and foul-mouthedness that drove women from the table at a certain point, and so inaugurated the custom, now continued merely as an excuse for a cigar?  Some one said once that a man finds in a great city just the qualities he takes to it.  That’s true of romance as well.  Modern novelists don’t find beauty and nobility in life, because they don’t look