But no one seems to have suspected what was approaching.
A wonderful literature had come into existence, not stately and classic as in the age preceding, but instinct with a new sort of life.

The profoundest themes which can occupy the mind of man were handled with marvellous lightness of touch and clothed with prismatic brilliancy of speech; but all was negation.

None tried to build; all to demolish.
The black-winged angel of Destruction was hovering over the land.
Then Rousseau tossed his dreamy abstractions into the quivering air, and the formula, "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity," was caught up by the titled aristocracy as a charming idyllic toy, while princes, dukes, and marquises amused themselves with a dream of Arcadian simplicity, to be attained in some indefinite way, in some remote and equally indefinite future.

It was all a masquerade.

No reality, no sincerity, no convictions, good or evil.