"It is in the connection of the conflict with the Yankee...that we can perhaps best understand the South's unusual proneness to sentimentality. The root of the thing, obviously, was in the simple man... It was part and parcel, in fact, with his unrealism and romanticism, and grew as they grew. It gathered force, too, from the Zeitgeist, of course—from the great tide of sentimentality which, rolling up slowly through the years following the French Revolution, broke over the Western world in flooding fullness with the accession of Victoria to the throne of England. Nowhere, indeed, did this Victorianism, with its false feeling, its excessive nicety, its will to the denial of the ugly, find more sympathetic acceptance than in the South."