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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Ancient Regime by Charles Kingsley: only on the ground of madness--an hypothesis which (as we do not yet
in the least understand what madness is) is no explanation at all.
An age of decay, incoherence, and makeshift, varnish and gilding
upon worm-eaten furniture, and mouldering wainscot, was that same
Ancien Regime. And for that very reason a picturesque age; like one
of its own landscapes. A picturesque bit of uncultivated mountain,
swarming with the prince's game; a picturesque old robber schloss
above, now in ruins; and below, perhaps, the picturesque new
schloss, with its French fountains and gardens, French nymphs of
marble, and of flesh and blood likewise, which the prince has
partially paid for, by selling a few hundred young men to the
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