Waller could be allowed to joke with Goring and sentimentalize with Hopton,for Waller was a gentleman, though a rebel; but it was a different thing when the Puritan gentlemen were seen to be gradually superseded by Puritan clowns.

In Sinclair Lewis' "Main Street," the best novel ever made about America as a nation of villagers, the heroine, Carol Kennicott, has this to say to someone sentimentalizing about maternity.

And these doctored stories, artfully sentimentalized at one end and expurgated at the other, are advanced as proofs that a savage Indian's love is just as refined as that of a civilized Christian!

And it is no good for us to sentimentalize on the subject.