THE largest annual event in New Orleans is a something which wearrived too late to sample--the Mardi-Gras festivities.

I saw the procession of the Mystic Crew of Comus there,twenty-four years ago--with knights and nobles and so on,clothed in silken and golden Paris-made gorgeousnesses,planned and bought for that single night's use; and in theirtrain all manner of giants, dwarfs, monstrosities, and otherdiverting grotesquerie--a startling and wonderful sort of show,as it filed solemnly and silently down the street in the lightof its smoking and flickering torches; but it is said thatin these latter days the spectacle is mightily augmented,as to cost, splendor, and variety. There is a chief personage--'Rex;'

and if I remember rightly, neither this king nor any of hisgreat following of subordinates is known to any outsider.

All these people are gentlemen of position and consequence;and it is a proud thing to belong to the organization; so the mysteryin which they hide their personality is merely for romance's sake,and not on account of the police.

Mardi-Gras is of course a relic of the French and Spanish occupation; but Ijudge 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 andthe oddities, and the pleasant creatures from fairy-land, is finer to lookat than the poor fantastic inventions and performances of the reveling rabbleof the priest's day, and serves quite as well, perhaps, to emphasize the dayand admonish men that the grace-line between the worldly season and the holyone is reached.

This Mardi-Gras pageant was the exclusive possession of NewOrleans until recently. But now it has spread to Memphis andSt. 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 timeas it would last in London. For the soul of it is the romantic,not the funny and the grotesque. Take away the romanticmysteries, 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 itand make merciless fun of it, and its first exhibition would bealso its last.

Against the crimes of the French Revolution and of Bonapartemay be set two compensating benefactions: the Revolutionbroke 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 whichBonaparte and the Revolution did, and leave the world in debtto them for these great and permanent services to liberty,humanity, and progress.

Then comes Sir Walter Scott with his enchantments, and by hissingle might checks this wave of progress, and even turns it back;sets the world in love with dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinishforms 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 anyother individual that ever wrote. Most of the world has nowoutlived good part of these harms, though by no means all of them;but in our South they flourish pretty forcefully still. Not soforcefully as half a generation ago, perhaps, but still forcefully.

There, the ge............