The Decent Drapery of Life

The Moral Imagination: From Edmund Burke to Lionel Trilling
By Gertrude Himmelfarb
Ivan R. Dee, 288 pages, $26

In the French Revolution’s “empire of light and reason,” Edmund Burke observed, “all the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the super-added ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies” are to be discarded and lost to future generations.

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