Here, indeed, it occurred to me that, somewhat farther back, I had referred, without assuming the proper elongation of countenance and a suitably spondaic utterance, to our natural delight in most forms of what we are generally agreed to describe as sin. And I hoped that would not be taken as implying that we can nowhere find more diverting employment than in wrong-doing, and should give over our lives to its practise. For iniquity, in its pleasanter branches, I reflected, is a pursuit in which the young excel. With age, one is adapted only for the less amusing crimes: and so with age one tends, upon the whole, and willy-nilly, to become reasonably virtuous. One tends, one in fact is driven, to seek diversion in the alcoves of thought rather than of action. One begins to toy amorously with ideas, now that age abates the ardor and the equipment for more juvenile recreations. Of course there were many ideas to play with: so congressmen harped zealously upon morals, with a just half-boastful air of having often heard of them; the clergy averted from instructing Heaven in its painful duty toward Germany, to settle civic affairs and the proper number of feet allowable to an embrace in moving picture films; and among our state justiciary far-reaching codes of literary criticism, not to speak of Clean Book Leagues, were evolved by the distressing discovery that one's daughter was running counter to parental traditions by reading a book. But hardier spirits would play with the greatest and most diverting of all ideas.... So that, in the outcome, I decided I would not, as I had intended to do, recur to Henry Adams. His thinking hardly aspires, it lacks such elevation as would warrant dwelling upon its modest pinnacles. Besides, there was always the ugly book which Adams wrote about John Randolph of Roanoke, to shake one's faith in the _Education_: once anybody has been at public pains to demonstrate himself an expert at coloring and falsifying the truth about another man, he cannot complain if none regards very trustingly his pretensions to write the truth as to himself. No doubt the prompter to this biographical blackguardism, the notion of standing up for your family name and your great-grandfather's intelligence, was all very well: and here, indeed, I could peculiarly sympathize, since it happened that my own paternal great-grandfather, also, had been aspersed by Randolph with just the same spirited and careful malignity he displayed in his verbal portraits of the Adams "bear and cub." Even so, it seemed to me that the natural impulse to atone by defaming Randolph was more easily understood than justified. § 45