Life & Wisdom Quote by Hervey Allen

History is rendered here as a parade of flags that quickly turns into an autopsy of a vanished order. Allen’s “Frenchman, Spaniard, and Englishman” aren’t characters so much as civilizational archetypes, each “leaving” behind a “legend” - a telling word that admits how empire survives as story long after it stops being a system. The line flatters the romance of the colonial past only to undercut it: legends are curated, selective, and useful. They’re what you keep when you’d rather not inventory what you took.

The real subject arrives with the pivot to economics. Allen names the social arrangement plainly: “aristocracy and slaves.” He refuses the gentler vocabulary (servants, dependents, laborers) that often sanitizes feudal nostalgia. And then he locates the engine beneath the pageantry: “the economic system upon which it rested.” That’s the quiet provocation. Civilization isn’t presented as a spontaneous flowering of culture; it’s a superstructure, propped up by extraction and coerced labor.

The phrase “brilliant and more or less feudal” does double duty. “Brilliant” captures the aesthetic seduction - architecture, manners, hierarchy made picturesque. “More or less” signals modern hesitation, the half-apology of a writer who knows the label “feudal” is both accurate and accusatory. Allen is writing in a period when the U.S. was professionalizing historical memory and mythmaking, especially around colonial frontiers: he gives you the glamour, then makes you look at the ledger. The civilization “departed,” yes - but the legends stayed to do their political work.