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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc, by
+Thomas de Quincey
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc
+
+Author: Thomas de Quincey
+
+Commentator: Milton Haight Turk
+
+Editor: Milton Haight Turk
+
+
+Release Date: August, 2004 [EBook #6359]
+This file was first posted on December 1, 2002
+Last Updated: June 14, 2013
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ENGLISH MAIL-COACH ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Anne Soulard, Charles Franks and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH
+
+AND
+
+JOAN OF ARC
+
+By Thomas De Quincey
+
+Edited With Introduction And Notes By Milton Haight Turk, Ph.D.
+
+
+
+
+TO CHARLES DEACON CREE
+
+THIS LITTLE VOLUME IS AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED
+
+_Glencairn, Kilmacolm, Scotland June 27, 1905_
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+Some portions of this Introduction have been taken from the Athenaeum
+Press _Selections from De Quincey_; many of the notes have also been
+transferred from that volume. A number of the new notes I owe to a
+review of the _Selections_ by Dr. Lane Cooper, of Cornell University.
+I wish also to thank for many favors the Committee and officers of the
+Glasgow University Library.
+
+If a word by way of suggestion to teachers be pertinent, I would venture
+to remark that the object of the teacher of literature is, of course,
+only to fulfill the desire of the author--to make clear his facts and
+to bring home his ideas in all their power and beauty. Introductions
+and notes are only means to this end. Teachers, I think, sometimes lose
+sight of this fact; I know it is fatally easy for students to forget it.
+That teacher will have rendered a great service who has kept his pupils
+alive to the real aim of their studies,--to know the author, not to know
+of him.
+
+M.H.T
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+INTRODUCTION I. LIFE II. CRITICAL REMARKS III. BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
+
+SELECTIONS  THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH
+  JOAN OF ARC
+
+NOTES
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+I. LIFE
+
+
+Thomas de Quincey was born in Manchester on the 15th of August, 1785.
+His father was a man of high character and great taste for literature as
+well as a successful man of business; he died, most unfortunately, when
+Thomas was quite young. Very soon after our author's birth the family
+removed to The Farm, and later to Greenhay, a larger country place near
+Manchester. In 1796 De Quincey's mother, now for some years a widow,
+removed to Bath and placed him in the grammar school there.
+
+Thomas, the future opium-eater, was a weak and sickly child. His first
+years were spent in solitude, and when his elder brother, William, a
+real boy, came home, the young author followed in humility mingled with
+terror the diversions of that ingenious and pugnacious "son of eternal
+racket." De Quincey's mother was a woman of strong character and
+emotions, as well as excellent mind, but she was excessively formal, and
+she seems to have inspired more awe than affection in her children,
+to whom she was for all that deeply devoted. Her notions of conduct in
+general and of child rearing in particular were very strict. She took
+Thomas out of Bath School, after three years' excellent work there,
+because he was too much praised, and kept him for a year at an inferior
+school at Winkfield in Wiltshire.
+
+In 1800, at the age of fifteen, De Quincey was ready for Oxford; he had
+not been praised without reason, for his scholarship was far in advance
+of that of ordinary pupils of his years. "That boy," his master at Bath
+School had said, "that boy could harangue an Athenian mob better than
+you or I could address an English one." He was sent to Manchester
+Grammar School, however, in order that after three years' stay he
+might secure a scholarship at Brasenose College, Oxford. He remained
+there--strongly protesting against a situation which deprived him "of
+_health_, of _society_, of _amusement_, of _liberty_, of _congeniality
+of pursuits_"--for nineteen months, and then ran away.
+
+His first plan had been to reach Wordsworth, whose _Lyrical Ballads_
+(1798) had solaced him in fits of melancholy and had awakened in him a
+deep reverence for the neglected poet. His timidity preventing this,
+he made his way to Chester, where his mother then lived, in the hope of
+seeing a sister; was apprehended by the older members of the family;
+and through the intercession of his uncle, Colonel Penson, received the
+promise of a guinea a week to carry out his later project of a solitary
+tramp through Wales. From July to November, 1802, De Quincey then led
+a wayfarer's life. [Footnote: For a most interesting account of this
+period see the _Confessions of an English Opium-Eater_, Athenaeum Press
+_Selections from De Quincey_, pp. 165-171, and notes.] He soon lost
+his guinea, however, by ceasing to keep his family informed of his
+whereabouts, and subsisted for a time with great difficulty. Still
+apparently fearing pursuit, with a little borrowed money he broke away
+entirely from his home by exchanging the solitude of Wales for the
+greater wilderness of London. Failing there to raise money on his
+expected patrimony, he for some time deliberately clung to a life of
+degradation and starvation rather than return to his lawful governors.
+
+Discovered by chance by his friends, De Quincey was brought home and
+finally allowed (1803) to go to Worcester College, Oxford, on a reduced
+income. Here, we are told, "he came to be looked upon as a strange being
+who associated with no one." During this time he learned to take opium.
+He left, apparently about 1807, without a degree. In the same year he
+made the acquaintance of Coleridge and Wordsworth; Lamb he had sought
+out in London several years before.
+
+His acquaintance with Wordsworth led to his settlement in 1809 at
+Grasmere, in the beautiful English Lake District; his home for ten years
+was Dove Cottage, which Wordsworth had occupied for several years and
+which is now held in trust as a memorial of the poet. De Quincey was
+married in 1816, and soon after, his patrimony having been exhausted, he
+took up literary work in earnest.
+
+In 1821 he went to London to dispose of some translations from German
+authors, but was persuaded first to write and publish an account of his
+opium experiences, which accordingly appeared in the _London Magazine_
+in that year. This new sensation eclipsed Lamb's _Essays of Elia_, which
+were appearing in the same periodical. The _Confessions of an English
+Opium-Eater_ was forthwith published in book form. De Quincey now made
+literary acquaintances. Tom Hood found the shrinking author "at home in
+a German ocean of literature, in a storm, flooding all the floor, the
+tables, and the chairs--billows of books." Richard Woodhouse speaks of
+the "depth and reality of his knowledge. ... His conversation appeared
+like the elaboration of a mine of results. ... Taylor led him into
+political economy, into the Greek and Latin accents, into antiquities,
+Roman roads, old castles, the origin and analogy of languages; upon all
+these he was informed to considerable minuteness. The same with regard
+to Shakespeare's sonnets, Spenser's minor poems, and the great writers
+and characters of Elizabeth's age and those of Cromwell's time."
+
+From this time on De Quincey maintained himself by contributing to
+various magazines. He soon exchanged London and the Lakes for Edinburgh
+and its suburb, Lasswade, where the remainder of his life was spent.
+_Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine_ and its rival _Tatt's Magazine_
+received a large number of contributions. _The English Mail-Coach_
+appeared in 1849 in Blackwood. _Joan of Arc_ had already been published
+(1847) in _Tait_. De Quincey continued to drink laudanum throughout his
+life,--twice after 1821 in very great excess. During his last years he
+nearly completed a collected edition of his works. He died in Edinburgh
+on the 8th of December, 1859.
+
+
+II. CRITICAL REMARKS
+
+
+The Opium-Eater had been a weak, lonely, and over-studious child, and he
+was a solitary and ill-developed man. His character and his work present
+strange contradictions. He is most precise in statement, yet often
+very careless of fact; he is most courteous in manner, yet inexcusably
+inconsiderate in his behavior. Again, he sets up a high standard
+of purity of diction, yet uses slang quite unnecessarily and
+inappropriately; and though a great master of style, he is guilty, at
+times, of digression within digression until all trace of the original
+subject is lost.
+
+De Quincey divides his writings into three groups: first, that class
+which "proposes primarily to amuse the reader, but which, in doing so,
+may or may not happen occasionally to reach a higher station, at which
+the amusement passes into an impassioned interest." To this class would
+belong the _Autobiographic Sketches_ and the _Literary Reminiscences_.
+As a second class he groups "those papers which address themselves
+purely to the understanding as an insulated faculty, or do so
+primarily." These essays would include, according to Professor Masson's
+subdivision, (a) Biographies, such as _Shakespeare_ or _Pope_--_Joan of
+Arc_ falls here, yet has some claim to a place in the first class; (b)
+Historical essays, like The _Caesars_; (c) Speculative and Theological
+essays; (d) Essays in Political Economy and Politics; (e) Papers of
+Literary Theory and Criticism, such as the brilliant discussions of
+_Rhetoric, Style_, and _Conversation_, and the famous _On the Knocking
+at the Gate in 'Macbeth_.' As a third and "far higher" class the author
+ranks the _Confessions of an English Opium-Eater_, and also (but more
+emphatically) the _Suspiria de Profundis_. "On these," he says, "as
+modes of impassioned prose ranging under no precedents that I am aware
+of in any literature, it is much more difficult to speak justly, whether
+in a hostile or a friendly character."
+
+Of De Quincey's essays in general it may be said that they bear witness
+alike to the diversity of his knowledge and the penetrative power of his
+intellect. The wide range of his subjects, however, deprives his papers
+when taken together of the weight which might attach to a series of
+related discussions. And, remarkable as is De Quincey's aptitude for
+analysis and speculation, more than once we have to regret the lack of
+the "saving common-sense" possessed by many far less gifted men.
+His erudition and insight are always a little in advance of his good
+judgment.
+
+As to the works of the first class, the _Reminiscences_ are defaced
+by the shrewish spirit shown in the accounts of Wordsworth and other
+friends; nor can we depend upon them as records of fact. But our author
+had had exceptional opportunities to observe these famous men and women,
+and he possessed no little insight into literature and personality. As
+to the _Autobiographic Sketches_, the handling of events is hopelessly
+arbitrary and fragmentary. In truth, De Quincey is drawing an idealized
+picture of childhood,--creating a type rather than re-creating a person;
+it is a study of a child of talent that we receive from him, and as such
+these sketches form one of the most satisfactory products of his pen.
+
+The _Confessions_ as a narrative is related to the Autobiography, while
+its poetical passages range it with the _Suspiria_ and the _Mail-Coach_.
+De Quincey seems to have believed that he was creating in such writings
+a new literary type of prose poetry or prose phantasy; he had, with
+his splendid dreams as subject-matter, lifted prose to heights
+hitherto scaled only by the poet. In reality his style owed much to the
+seventeenth-century writers, such as Milton and Sir Thomas Browne. He
+took part with Coleridge, Lamb, and others in the general revival of
+interest in earlier modern English prose, which is a feature of the
+Romantic Movement. Still none of his contemporaries wrote as he did;
+evidently De Quincey has a distinct quality of his own. Ruskin, in our
+own day, is like him, but never the same.
+
+Yet De Quincey's prose poetry is a very small portion of his work, and
+it is not in this way only that he excels. Mr. Saintsbury has spoken of
+the strong appeal that De Quincey makes to boys. [Footnote: "Probably
+more boys have in the last forty years been brought to a love
+of literature proper by De Quincy than by any other writer
+whatever."--_History of Nineteenth-Century Literature_, p.198.] It is
+not without significance that he mentions as especially attractive to
+the young only writings with a large narrative element. [Footnote: "To
+read the _Essay on Murder_, the _English Mail-Coach_, _The Spanish Nun_,
+_The Caesars_, and half a score other things at the age of about fifteen
+or sixteen is, or ought to be, to fall in love with them."--_Essays in
+English Literature_, 1780-1860, p.307.] Few boys read poetry, whether in
+verse or prose, and fewer still criticism or philosophy; to every normal
+boy the gate of good literature is the good story. It is the narrative
+skill of De Quincey that has secured for him, in preference to other
+writers of his class, the favor of youthful readers.
+
+It would be too much to say that the talent that attracts the young to
+him must needs be the Opium-Eater's grand talent, though the notion is
+defensible, seeing that only salient qualities in good writing appeal to
+inexperienced readers. I believe, however, that this skill in narration
+is De Quincey's most persistent quality,--the golden thread that unites
+all his most distinguished and most enduring work. And it is with him
+a part of his genius for style. Creative power of the kind that goes to
+the making of plots De Quincey had not; he has proved that forever by
+the mediocrity of _Klosterheim_. Give him Bergmann's account of the
+Tartar Migration, or the story of the Fighting Nun,--give him the
+matter,--and a brilliant narrative will result. Indeed, De Quincey
+loved a story for its own sake; he rejoiced to see it extend its winding
+course before him; he delighted to follow it, touch it, color it, see it
+grow into body and being under his hand. That this enthusiasm should now
+and then tend to endanger the integrity of the facts need not surprise
+us; as I have said elsewhere, accuracy in these matters is hardly to
+be expected of De Quincey. And we can take our pleasure in the skillful
+unfolding of the dramatic narrative of the Tartar Flight--we can feel
+the author's joy in the scenic possibilities of his theme--even if we
+know that here and there an incident appears that is quite in its proper
+place--but is unknown to history.
+
+In his _Confessions_ the same constructive power bears its part in
+the author's triumph. A peculiar end was to be reached in that
+narrative,--an end in which the writer had a deep personal interest.
+What is an opium-eater? Says a character in a recent work of fiction,
+of a social wreck: "If it isn't whisky with him, it's opium; if it isn't
+opium, it's whisky." This speech establishes the popular category in
+which De Quincey's habit had placed him. Our attention was to be drawn
+from these degrading connections. And this is done not merely by the
+correction of some widespread fallacies as to the effects of the
+drug; far more it is the result of narrative skill. As we follow with
+ever-increasing sympathy the lonely and sensitive child, the wandering
+youth, the neuralgic patient, into the terrible grasp of opium, who
+realizes, amid the gorgeous delights and the awful horrors of the tale,
+that the writer is after all the victim of the worst of bad habits? We
+can hardly praise too highly the art which even as we look beneath it
+throws its glamour over us still.
+
+Nor is it only in this constructive power, in the selection and
+arrangement of details, that De Quincey excels as a narrator; a score
+of minor excellences of his style, such as the fine Latin words or the
+sweeping periodic sentences, contribute to the effective progress of his
+narrative prose. Mr. Lowell has said that "there are no such vistas and
+avenues of verse as Milton's." The comparison is somewhat hazardous,
+still I should like to venture the parallel claim that there are no such
+streams of prose as De Quincey's. The movement of his discourse is that
+of the broad river, not in its weight or force perhaps, but in its easy
+flowing progress, in its serene, unhurried certainty of its end. To be
+sure, only too often the waters overflow their banks and run far afield
+in alien channels. Yet, when great power over the instrument of language
+is joined to so much constructive skill, the result is narrative art of
+high quality,--an achievement that must be in no small measure the solid
+basis of De Quincey's fame.
+
+
+III. BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
+
+I. WORKS
+
+
+1. _The Collected Writings of Thomas de Quincey_. New and enlarged
+edition by David Masson. Edinburgh: A. and C. Black, 1889-1890. [New
+York: The Macmillan Co. 14 vols., with footnotes, a preface to each
+volume, and index. Reissued in cheaper form. The standard edition.]
+
+2. _The Works of Thomas de Quincey_. Riverside Edition. Boston:
+Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1877. [12 vols., with notes and index.]
+
+3. _Selections from De Quincey._ Edited with an Introduction and Notes,
+by M. H. Turk. Athenaeum Press Series. Boston, U.S.A., and London: Ginn
+and Company, 1902. ["The largest body of selections from De Quincey
+recently published.... The selections are _The affliction of Childhood,
+Introduction to the World of Strife, A Meeting with Lamb, A Meeting
+with Coleridge, Recollections of Wordsworth, Confessions, A Portion of
+Suspiria, The English Mail-Coach, Murder as one of the Fine Arts, Second
+Paper, Joan of Arc,_ and _On the Knocking at the Gate in 'Macbeth.'_"]
+
+
+II. BIOGRAPHY AND CRITICISM
+
+
+4. D. MASSON. _Thomas De Quincey._ English Men of Letters. London.
+[New York: Harper. An excellent brief biography. This book, with a
+good volume of selections, should go far toward supplying the ordinary
+student's needs.]
+
+5. H. S. SALT. DE QUINCEY. Bell's Miniature Series of Great Writers.
+London: George Bell and Sons. [A good short life.] 6. A. H. JAPP.
+_Thomas De Quincey: His Life and Writings._ London, 1890. [New York:
+Scribner. First edition by "H. A. Page," 1877. The standard life of
+De Quincey; it contains valuable communications from De Quincey's
+daughters, J. Hogg, Rev. F. Jacox, Professor Masson, and others.]
+
+7. A. H. JAPP. _De Quincey Memorials. Being Letters and Other
+Records, here first published. With Communications from Coleridge, the
+Wordsworths, Hannah More, Professor Wilson, and others._ 2 vols. London:
+W. Heinemann, 1891.
+
+8. J. HOGG. _De Quincey and his Friends, Personal Recollections,
+Souvenirs, and Anecdotes_ [including Woodhouse's _Conversations_,
+Findlay's _Personal Recollections_, Hodgson's _On the Genius of De
+Quincey_, and a mass of personal notes from a host of friends]. London:
+Sampson Low, Marston & Co., 1895.
+
+9. E. T. MASON. _Personal Traits of British Authors_. New York, 1885. [4
+vols. The volume subtitled _Scott, Hogg,_ etc., contains some accounts
+of De Quincey not included by Japp or Hogg.]
+
+10. L. STEPHEN. _Hours in a Library_. Vol. I. New York, 1892.
+
+11. W. MINTO. _Manual of English Prose Literature_. Boston, 1889.
+[Contains the best general discussion of De Quincey's style.]
+
+12. L. COOPER. _The Prose Poetry of Thomas De Quincey_. Leipzig, 1902.
+
+
+
+
+THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH
+
+SECTION I--THE GLORY OF MOTION
+
+
+Some twenty or more years before I matriculated at Oxford, Mr. Palmer,
+at that time M.P. for Bath, had accomplished two things, very hard to
+do on our little planet, the Earth, however cheap they may be held by
+eccentric people in comets: he had invented mail-coaches, and he had
+married the daughter of a duke. He was, therefore, just twice as great
+a man as Galileo, who did certainly invent (or, which is the same thing,
+[Footnote: "_The same thing_":--Thus, in the calendar of the Church
+Festivals, the discovery of the true cross (by Helen, the mother
+of Constantine) is recorded (and, one might think, with the express
+consciousness of sarcasm) as the _Invention_ of the Cross.] discover)
+the satellites of Jupiter, those very next things extant to mail-coaches
+in the two capital pretensions of speed and keeping time, but, on the
+other hand, who did _not_ marry the daughter of a duke.
+
+These mail-coaches, as organised by Mr. Palmer, are entitled to a
+circumstantial notice from myself, having had so large a share in
+developing the anarchies of my subsequent dreams: an agency which they
+accomplished, 1st, through velocity at that time unprecedented--for they
+first revealed the glory of motion; 2dly, through grand effects for
+the eye between lamplight and the darkness upon solitary roads; 3dly,
+through animal beauty and power so often displayed in the class of
+horses selected for this mail service; 4thly, through the conscious
+presence of a central intellect, that, in the midst of vast distances
+[Footnote: "Vast distances":--One case was familiar to mail-coach
+travellers where two mails in opposite directions, north and south,
+starting at the same minute from points six hundred miles apart, met
+almost constantly at a particular bridge which bisected the total
+distance.]--of storms, of darkness, of danger--overruled all obstacles
+into one steady co-operation to a national result. For my own feeling,
+this post-office service spoke as by some mighty orchestra, where a
+thousand instruments, all disregarding each other, and so far in danger
+of discord, yet all obedient as slaves to the supreme _baton_ of some
+great leader, terminate in a perfection of harmony like that of heart,
+brain, and lungs in a healthy animal organisation. But, finally, that
+particular element in this whole combination which most impressed
+myself, and through which it is that to this hour Mr. Palmer's
+mail-coach system tyrannises over my dreams by terror and terrific
+beauty, lay in the awful _political_ mission which at that time it
+fulfilled. The mail-coach it was that distributed over the face of the
+land, like the opening of apocalyptic vials, the heart-shaking news
+of Trafalgar, of Salamanca, of Vittoria, of Waterloo. These were the
+harvests that, in the grandeur of their reaping, redeemed the tears and
+blood in which they had been sown. Neither was the meanest peasant
+so much below the grandeur and the sorrow of the times as to confound
+battles such as these, which were gradually moulding the destinies of
+Christendom, with the vulgar conflicts of ordinary warfare, so often
+no more than gladiatorial trials of national prowess. The victories of
+England in this stupendous contest rose of themselves as natural _Te
+Deums_ to heaven; and it was felt by the thoughtful that such victories,
+at such a crisis of general prostration, were not more beneficial to
+ourselves than finally to France, our enemy, and to the nations of all
+western or central Europe, through whose pusillanimity it was that the
+French domination had prospered.
+
+The mail-coach, as the national organ for publishing these mighty
+events, thus diffusively influential, became itself a spiritualised and
+glorified object to an impassioned heart; and naturally, in the Oxford
+of that day, _all_ hearts were impassioned, as being all (or nearly all)
+in _early_ manhood. In most universities there is one single college;
+in Oxford there were five-and-twenty, all of which were peopled by young
+men, the _elite_ of their own generation; not boys, but men: none
+under eighteen. In some of these many colleges the custom permitted the
+student to keep what are called "short terms"; that is, the four terms
+of Michaelmas, Lent, Easter, and Act, were kept by a residence, in the
+aggregate, of ninety-one days, or thirteen weeks. Under this interrupted
+residence, it was possible that a student might have a reason for going
+down to his home four times in the year. This made eight journeys to
+and fro. But, as these homes lay dispersed through all the shires of the
+island, and most of us disdained all coaches except his Majesty's mail,
+no city out of London could pretend to so extensive a connexion with Mr.
+Palmer's establishment as Oxford. Three mails, at the least, I remember
+as passing every day through Oxford, and benefiting by my personal
+patronage--viz., the Worcester, the Gloucester, and the Holyhead mail.
+Naturally, therefore, it became a point of some interest with us, whose
+journeys revolved every six weeks on an average, to look a little into
+the executive details of the system. With some of these Mr. Palmer had
+no concern; they rested upon bye-laws enacted by posting-houses for
+their own benefit, and upon other bye-laws, equally stern, enacted
+by the inside passengers for the illustration of their own haughty
+exclusiveness. These last were of a nature to rouse our scorn; from
+which the transition was not very long to systematic mutiny. Up to this
+time, say 1804, or 1805 (the year of Trafalgar), it had been the fixed
+assumption of the four inside people (as an old tradition of all
+public carriages derived from the reign of Charles II) that they, the
+illustrious quaternion, constituted a porcelain variety of the human
+race, whose dignity would have been compromised by exchanging one word
+of civility with the three miserable delf-ware outsides. Even to have
+kicked an outsider might have been held to attaint the foot concerned
+in that operation, so that, perhaps, it would have required an act
+of Parliament to restore its purity of blood. What words, then, could
+express the horror, and the sense of treason, in that case, which _had_
+happened, where all three outsides (the trinity of Pariahs) made a vain
+attempt to sit down at the same breakfast-table or dinner-table with
+the consecrated four? I myself witnessed such an attempt; and on that
+occasion a benevolent old gentleman endeavoured to soothe his three holy
+associates, by suggesting that, if the outsides were indicted for this
+criminal attempt at the next assizes, the court would regard it as a
+case of lunacy or _delirium tremens_ rather than of treason. England
+owes much of her grandeur to the depth of the aristocratic element in
+her social composition, when pulling against her strong democracy. I
+am not the man to laugh at it. But sometimes, undoubtedly, it expressed
+itself in comic shapes. The course taken with the infatuated outsiders,
+in the particular attempt which I have noticed, was that the waiter,
+beckoning them away from the privileged _salle-a-manger_, sang out,
+"This way, my good men," and then enticed these good men away to the
+kitchen. But that plan had not always answered. Sometimes, though
+rarely, cases occurred where the intruders, being stronger than usual,
+or more vicious than usual, resolutely refused to budge, and so far
+carried their point as to have a separate table arranged for themselves
+in a corner of the general room. Yet, if an Indian screen could be found
+ample enough to plant them out from the very eyes of the high table, or
+_dais_, it then became possible to assume as a fiction of law that the
+three delf fellows, after all, were not present. They could be ignored
+by the porcelain men, under the maxim that objects not appearing and
+objects not existing are governed by the same logical construction.
+[Footnote: _De non apparentibus_, etc.]
+
+Such being, at that time, the usage of mail-coaches, what was to be done
+by us of young Oxford? We, the most aristocratic of people, who were
+addicted to the practice of looking down superciliously even upon the
+insides themselves as often very questionable characters--were we,
+by voluntarily going outside, to court indignities? If our dress and
+bearing sheltered us generally from the suspicion of being "raff"
+(the name at that period for "snobs" [Footnote: "_Snobs_," and its
+antithesis, "_nobs_," arose among the internal factions of shoemakers
+perhaps ten years later. Possibly enough, the terms may have existed
+much earlier; but they were then first made known, picturesquely and
+effectively, by a trial at some assizes which happened to fix the public
+attention.]), we really _were_ such constructively by the place we
+assumed. If we did not submit to the deep shadow of eclipse, we entered
+at least the skirts of its penumbra. And the analogy of theatres was
+valid against us,--where no man can complain of the annoyances incident
+to the pit or gallery, having his instant remedy in paying the higher
+price of the boxes. But the soundness of this analogy we disputed.
+In the case of the theatre, it cannot be pretended that the inferior
+situations have any separate attractions, unless the pit may be supposed
+to have an advantage for the purposes of the critic or the dramatic
+reporter. But the critic or reporter is a rarity. For most people, the
+sole benefit is in the price. Now, on the contrary, the outside of the
+mail had its own incommunicable advantages. These we could not forego.
+The higher price we would willingly have paid, but not the price
+connected with the condition of riding inside; which condition we
+pronounced insufferable. The air, the freedom of prospect, the proximity
+to the horses, the elevation of seat: these were what we required;
+but, above all, the certain anticipation of purchasing occasional
+opportunities of driving.
+
+Such was the difficulty which pressed us; and under the coercion of this
+difficulty we instituted a searching inquiry into the true quality and
+valuation of the different apartments about the mail. We conducted
+this inquiry on metaphysical principles; and it was ascertained
+satisfactorily that the roof of the coach, which by some weak men had
+been called the attics, and by some the garrets, was in reality the
+drawing-room; in which drawing-room the box was the chief ottoman or
+sofa; whilst it appeared that the _inside_ which had been traditionally
+regarded as the only room tenantable by gentlemen, was, in fact, the
+coal-cellar in disguise.
+
+Great wits jump. The very same idea had not long before struck the
+celestial intellect of China. Amongst the presents carried out by our
+first embassy to that country was a state-coach. It had been specially
+selected as a personal gift by George III; but the exact mode of
+using it was an intense mystery to Pekin. The ambassador, indeed (Lord
+Macartney), had made some imperfect explanations upon this point; but,
+as His Excellency communicated these in a diplomatic whisper at the
+very moment of his departure, the celestial intellect was very feebly
+illuminated, and it became necessary to call a cabinet council on the
+grand state question, "Where was the Emperor to sit?" The hammer-cloth
+happened to be unusually gorgeous; and, partly on that consideration,
+but partly also because the box offered the most elevated seat, was
+nearest to the moon, and undeniably went foremost, it was resolved by
+acclamation that the box was the imperial throne, and, for the scoundrel
+who drove,--he might sit where he could find a perch. The horses,
+therefore, being harnessed, solemnly his imperial majesty ascended his
+new English throne under a flourish of trumpets, having the first lord
+of the treasury on his right hand, and the chief jester on his left.
+Pekin gloried in the spectacle; and in the whole flowery people,
+constructively present by representation, there was but one discontented
+person, and _that_ was the coachman. This mutinous individual
+audaciously shouted, "Where am _I_ to sit?" But the privy council,
+incensed by his disloyalty, unanimously opened the door, and kicked him
+into the inside. He had all the inside places to himself; but such is
+the rapacity of ambition that he was still dissatisfied. "I say," he
+cried out in an extempore petition addressed to the Emperor through the
+window--"I say, how am I to catch hold of the reins?"--"Anyhow," was the
+imperial answer; "don't trouble _me_, man, in my glory. How catch
+the reins? Why, through the windows, through the keyholes--_anyhow_."
+Finally this contumacious coachman lengthened the check-strings into a
+sort of jury-reins communicating with the horses; with these he drove
+as steadily as Pekin had any right to expect. The Emperor returned after
+the briefest of circuits; he descended in great pomp from his throne,
+with the severest resolution never to remount it. A public thanksgiving
+was ordered for his majesty's happy escape from the disease of a broken
+neck; and the state-coach was dedicated thenceforward as a votive
+offering to the god Fo Fo--whom the learned more accurately called Fi
+Fi.
+
+A revolution of this same Chinese character did young Oxford of that
+era effect in the constitution of mail-coach society. It was a perfect
+French Revolution; and we had good reason to say, _ca ira_. In fact,
+it soon became _too_ popular. The "public"--a well-known character,
+particularly disagreeable, though slightly respectable, and notorious
+for affecting the chief seats in synagogues--had at first loudly
+opposed this revolution; but, when the opposition showed itself to be
+ineffectual, our disagreeable friend went into it with headlong zeal.
+At first it was a sort of race between us; and, as the public is usually
+from thirty to fifty years old, naturally we of young Oxford, that
+averaged about twenty, had the advantage. Then the public took to
+bribing, giving fees to horse-keepers, &c., who hired out their persons
+as warming-pans on the box seat. _That_, you know, was shocking to all
+moral sensibilities. Come to bribery, said we, and there is an end
+to all morality,--Aristotle's, Zeno's, Cicero's, or anybody's. And,
+besides, of what use was it? For _we_ bribed also. And, as our bribes,
+to those of the public, were as five shillings to sixpence, here again
+young Oxford had the advantage. But the contest was ruinous to
+the principles of the stables connected with the mails. This whole
+corporation was constantly bribed, rebribed, and often surrebribed; a
+mail-coach yard was like the hustings in a contested election; and a
+horse-keeper, ostler, or helper, was held by the philosophical at that
+time to be the most corrupt character in the nation.
+
+There was an impression upon the public mind, natural enough from the
+continually augmenting velocity of the mail, but quite erroneous, that
+an outside seat on this class of carriages was a post of danger. On the
+contrary, I maintained that, if a man had become nervous from some
+gipsy prediction in his childhood, allocating to a particular moon
+now approaching some unknown danger, and he should inquire earnestly,
+"Whither can I fly for shelter? Is a prison the safest retreat? or a
+lunatic hospital? or the British Museum?" I should have replied, "Oh no;
+I'll tell you what to do. Take lodgings for the next forty days on the
+box of his Majesty's mail. Nobody can touch you there. If it is by
+bills at ninety days after date that you are made unhappy--if noters and
+protesters are the sort of wretches whose astrological shadows darken
+the house of life--then note you what I vehemently protest: viz., that,
+no matter though the sheriff and under-sheriff in every county should be
+running after you with his _posse_, touch a hair of your head he cannot
+whilst you keep house and have your legal domicile on the box of the
+mail. It is felony to stop the mail; even the sheriff cannot do that.
+And an _extra_ touch of the whip to the leaders (no great matter if
+it grazes the sheriff) at any time guarantees your safety." In fact, a
+bedroom in a quiet house seems a safe enough retreat; yet it is liable
+to its own notorious nuisances--to robbers by night, to rats, to fire.
+But the mail laughs at these terrors. To robbers, the answer is packed
+up and ready for delivery in the barrel of the guard's blunderbuss. Rats
+again! there _are_ none about mail-coaches any more than snakes in Von
+Troil's Iceland; [Footnote: "_Von Troil's Iceland_":--The allusion is
+to a well-known chapter in Von Troil's work, entitled, "Concerning
+the Snakes of Iceland." The entire chapter consists of these six
+words--"_There art no snakes in Iceland_."] except, indeed, now and then
+a parliamentary rat, who always hides his shame in what I have shown
+to be the "coal-cellar." And, as to fire, I never knew but one in a
+mail-coach; which was in the Exeter mail, and caused by an obstinate
+sailor bound to Devonport. Jack, making light of the law and the
+lawgiver that had set their faces against his offence, insisted on
+taking up a forbidden seat [Footnote: "_Forbidden seat_":--The very
+sternest code of rules was enforced upon the mails by the Post-office.
+Throughout England, only three outsides were allowed, of whom one was
+to sit on the box, and the other two immediately behind the box; none,
+under any pretext, to come near the guard; an indispensable caution;
+since else, under the guise of a passenger, a robber might by any one
+of a thousand advantages--which sometimes are created, but always are
+favoured, by the animation of frank social intercourse--have disarmed
+the guard. Beyond the Scottish border, the regulation was so far relaxed
+as to allow of _four_ outsides, but not relaxed at all as to the mode of
+placing them. One, as before, was seated on the box, and the other three
+on the front of the roof, with a determinate and ample separation from
+the little insulated chair of the guard. This relaxation was conceded
+by way of compensating to Scotland her disadvantages in point of
+population. England, by the superior density of her population, might
+always count upon a large fund of profits in the fractional trips of
+chance passengers riding for short distances of two or three stages. In
+Scotland this chance counted for much less. And therefore, to make good
+the deficiency, Scotland was allowed a compensatory profit upon one
+_extra_ passenger.] in the rear of the roof, from which he could
+exchange his own yarns with those of the guard. No greater offence was
+then known to mail-coaches; it was treason, it was _laesa majestas_, it
+was by tendency arson; and the ashes of Jack's pipe, falling amongst the
+straw of the hinder boot, containing the mail-bags, raised a flame
+which (aided by the wind of our motion) threatened a revolution in
+the republic of letters. Yet even this left the sanctity of the box
+unviolated. In dignified repose, the coachman and myself sat on, resting
+with benign composure upon our knowledge that the fire would have
+to burn its way through four inside passengers before it could reach
+ourselves. I remarked to the coachman, with a quotation from Virgil's
+"AEneid" really too hackneyed--
+
+  "Jam proximus ardet
+  Ucalegon."
+
+But, recollecting that the Virgilian part of the coachman's education
+might have been neglected, I interpreted so far as to say that perhaps
+at that moment the flames were catching hold of our worthy brother and
+inside passenger, Ucalegon. The coachman made no answer,--which is my
+own way when a stranger addresses me either in Syriac or in Coptic;
+but by his faint sceptical smile he seemed to insinuate that he knew
+better,--for that Ucalegon, as it happened, was not in the way-bill, and
+therefore could not have been booked.
+
+No dignity is perfect which does not at some point ally itself with the
+mysterious. The connexion of the mail with the state and the executive
+government--a connexion obvious, but yet not strictly defined--gave to
+the whole mail establishment an official grandeur which did us service
+on the roads, and invested us with seasonable terrors. Not the
+less impressive were those terrors because their legal limits were
+imperfectly ascertained. Look at those turnpike gates: with what
+deferential hurry, with what an obedient start, they fly open at our
+approach! Look at that long line of carts and carters ahead, audaciously
+usurping the very crest of the road. Ah! traitors, they do not hear us
+as yet; but, as soon as the dreadful blast of our horn reaches them with
+proclamation of our approach, see with what frenzy of trepidation they
+fly to their horses' heads, and deprecate our wrath by the precipitation
+of their crane-neck quarterings. Treason they feel to be their crime;
+each individual carter feels himself under the ban of confiscation and
+attainder; his blood is attainted through six generations; and nothing
+is wanting but the headsman and his axe, the block and the sawdust, to
+close up the vista of his horrors. What! shall it be within benefit of
+clergy to delay the king's message on the high road?--to interrupt the
+great respirations, ebb and flood, _systole_ and _diastole_, of the
+national intercourse?--to endanger the safety of tidings running day and
+night between all nations and languages? Or can it be fancied, amongst
+the weakest of men, that the bodies of the criminals will be given up to
+their widows for Christian burial? Now, the doubts which were raised
+as to our powers did more to wrap them in terror, by wrapping them in
+uncertainty, than could have been effected by the sharpest definitions
+of the law from the Quarter Sessions. We, on our parts (we, the
+collective mail, I mean), did our utmost to exalt the idea of our
+privileges by the insolence with which we wielded them. Whether this
+insolence rested upon law that gave it a sanction, or upon conscious
+power that haughtily dispensed with that sanction, equally it spoke from
+a potential station; and the agent, in each particular insolence of the
+moment, was viewed reverentially, as one having authority.
+
+Sometimes after breakfast his Majesty's mail would become frisky; and,
+in its difficult wheelings amongst the intricacies of early markets,
+it would upset an apple-cart, a cart loaded with eggs, &c. Huge was
+the affliction and dismay, awful was the smash. I, as far as possible,
+endeavoured in such a case to represent the conscience and moral
+sensibilities of the mail; and, when wildernesses of eggs were lying
+poached under our horses' hoofs, then would I stretch forth my hands
+in sorrow, saying (in words too celebrated at that time, from the false
+echoes [Footnote: "_False echoes_":--Yes, false! for the words ascribed
+to Napoleon, as breathed to the memory of Desaix, never were uttered at
+all. They stand in the same category of theatrical fictions as the cry
+of the foundering line-of-battle ship _Vengeur_, as the vaunt of General
+Cambronne at Waterloo, "La Garde meurt, mais ne se rend pas," or as the
+repartees of Talleyrand.] of Marengo), "Ah! wherefore have we not time
+to weep over you?"--which was evidently impossible, since, in fact, we
+had not time to laugh over them. Tied to post-office allowance in some
+cases of fifty minutes for eleven miles, could the royal mail pretend to
+undertake the offices of sympathy and condolence? Could it be expected
+to provide tears for the accidents of the road? If even it seemed to
+trample on humanity, it did so, I felt, in discharge of its own more
+peremptory duties.
+
+Upholding the morality of the mail, _a fortiori_ I upheld its rights; as
+a matter of duty, I stretched to the uttermost its privilege of imperial
+precedency, and astonished weak minds by the feudal powers which I
+hinted to be lurking constructively in the charters of this proud
+establishment. Once I remember being on the box of the Holyhead mail,
+between Shrewsbury and Oswestry, when a tawdry thing from Birmingham,
+some "Tallyho" or "Highflyer," all flaunting with green and gold, came
+up alongside of us. What a contrast to our royal simplicity of form and
+colour in this plebeian wretch! The single ornament on our dark ground
+of chocolate colour was the mighty shield of the imperial arms, but
+emblazoned in proportions as modest as a signet-ring bears to a seal
+of office. Even this was displayed only on a single panel, whispering,
+rather than proclaiming, our relations to the mighty state; whilst the
+beast from Birmingham, our green-and-gold friend from false, fleeting,
+perjured Brummagem, had as much writing and painting on its sprawling
+flanks as would have puzzled a decipherer from the tombs of Luxor. For
+some time this Birmingham machine ran along by our side--a piece
+of familiarity that already of itself seemed to me sufficiently
+Jacobinical. But all at once a movement of the horses announced a
+desperate intention of leaving us behind. "Do you see _that?_" I said to
+the coachman.--"I see," was his short answer. He was wide awake,--yet
+he waited longer than seemed prudent; for the horses of our audacious
+opponent had a disagreeable air of freshness and power. But his motive
+was loyal; his wish was that the Birmingham conceit should be full-blown
+before he froze it. When _that_ seemed right, he unloosed, or, to speak
+by a stronger word, he _sprang_, his known resources: he slipped our
+royal horses like cheetahs, or hunting-leopards, after the affrighted
+game. How they could retain such a reserve of fiery power after the work
+they had accomplished seemed hard to explain. But on our side, besides
+the physical superiority, was a tower of moral strength, namely the
+king's name, "which they upon the adverse faction wanted." Passing them
+without an effort, as it seemed, we threw them into the rear with so
+lengthening an interval between us as proved in itself the bitterest
+mockery of their presumption; whilst our guard blew back a shattering
+blast of triumph that was really too painfully full of derision.
+
+I mention this little incident for its connexion with what followed. A
+Welsh rustic, sitting behind me, asked if I had not felt my heart burn
+within me during the progress of the race? I said, with philosophic
+calmness, _No_; because we were not racing with a mail, so that no glory
+could be gained. In fact, it was sufficiently mortifying that such a
+Birmingham thing should dare to challenge us. The Welshman replied
+that he didn't see _that_; for that a cat might look at a king, and a
+Brummagem coach might lawfully race the Holyhead mail. "_Race_ us, if
+you like," I replied, "though even _that_ has an air of sedition; but
+not _beat_ us. This would have been treason; and for its own sake I
+am glad that the 'Tallyho' was disappointed." So dissatisfied did the
+Welshman seem with this opinion that at last I was obliged to tell him
+a very fine story from one of our elder dramatists: viz., that once,
+in some far Oriental kingdom, when the sultan of all the land, with his
+princes, ladies, and chief omrahs, were flying their falcons, a hawk
+suddenly flew at a majestic eagle, and, in defiance of the eagle's
+natural advantages, in contempt also of the eagle's traditional royalty,
+and before the whole assembled field of astonished spectators from Agra
+and Lahore, killed the eagle on the spot. Amazement seized the sultan at
+the unequal contest, and burning admiration for its unparalleled result.
+He commanded that the hawk should be brought before him; he caressed the
+bird with enthusiasm; and he ordered that, for the commemoration of his
+matchless courage, a diadem of gold and rubies should be solemnly
+placed on the hawk's head, but then that, immediately after this solemn
+coronation, the bird should be led off to execution, as the most valiant
+indeed of traitors, but not the less a traitor, as having dared to rise
+rebelliously against his liege lord and anointed sovereign, the eagle.
+"Now," said I to the Welshman, "to you and me, as men of refined
+sensibilities, how painful it would have been that this poor Brummagem
+brute, the 'Tallyho,' in the impossible case of a victory over us,
+should have been crowned with Birmingham tinsel, with paste diamonds
+and Roman pearls, and then led off to instant execution." The Welshman
+doubted if that could be warranted by law. And, when I hinted at the
+6th of Edward Longshanks, chap. 18, for regulating the precedency
+of coaches, as being probably the statute relied on for the capital
+punishment of such offences, he replied drily that, if the attempt to
+pass a mail really were treasonable, it was a pity that the "Tallyho"
+appeared to have so imperfect an acquaintance with law.
+
+The modern modes of travelling cannot compare with the old mail-coach
+system in grandeur and power. They boast of more velocity,--not,
+however, as a consciousness, but as a fact of our lifeless knowledge,
+resting upon _alien_ evidence: as, for instance, because somebody
+_says_ that we have gone fifty miles in the hour, though we are far from
+feeling it as a personal experience; or upon the evidence of a result,
+as that actually we find ourselves in York four hours after leaving
+London. Apart from such an assertion, or such a result, I myself am
+little aware of the pace. But, seated on the old mail-coach, we needed
+no evidence out of ourselves to indicate the velocity. On this system
+the word was not _magna loquimur_, as upon railways, but _vivimus_. Yes,
+"magna _vivimus_"; we do not make verbal ostentation of our grandeurs,
+we realise our grandeurs in act, and in the very experience of life. The
+vital experience of the glad animal sensibilities made doubts impossible
+on the question of our speed; we heard our speed, we saw it, we felt it
+as a thrilling; and this speed was not the product of blind insensate
+agencies, that had no sympathy to give, but was incarnated in the
+fiery eyeballs of the noblest amongst brutes, in his dilated nostril,
+spasmodic muscles, and thunder-beating hoofs. The sensibility of the
+horse, uttering itself in the maniac light of his eye, might be the last
+vibration of such a movement; the glory of Salamanca might be the
+first. But the intervening links that connected them, that spread the
+earthquake of battle into the eyeballs of the horse, were the heart of
+man and its electric thrillings--kindling in the rapture of the fiery
+strife, and then propagating its own tumults by contagious shouts and
+gestures to the heart of his servant the horse. But now, on the new
+system of travelling, iron tubes and boilers have disconnected man's
+heart from the ministers of his locomotion. Nile nor Trafalgar has power
+to raise an extra bubble in a steam-kettle. The galvanic cycle is
+broken up for ever; man's imperial nature no longer sends itself forward
+through the electric sensibility of the horse; the inter-agencies are
+gone in the mode of communication between the horse and his master out
+of which grew so many aspects of sublimity under accidents of mists that
+hid, or sudden blazes that revealed, of mobs that agitated, or midnight
+solitudes that awed. Tidings fitted to convulse all nations must
+henceforwards travel by culinary process; and the trumpet that once
+announced from afar the laurelled mail, heart-shaking when heard
+screaming on the wind and proclaiming itself through the darkness to
+every village or solitary house on its route, has now given way for
+ever to the pot-wallopings of the boiler. Thus have perished multiform
+openings for public expressions of interest, scenical yet natural, in
+great national tidings,--for revelations of faces and groups that could
+not offer themselves amongst the fluctuating mobs of a railway station.
+The gatherings of gazers about a laurelled mail had one centre, and
+acknowledged one sole interest. But the crowds attending at a railway
+station have as little unity as running water, and own as many centres
+as there are separate carriages in the train.
+
+How else, for example, than as a constant watcher for the dawn, and for
+the London mail that in summer months entered about daybreak amongst the
+lawny thickets of Maryborough forest, couldst thou, sweet Fanny of the
+Bath road, have become the glorified inmate of my dreams? Yet Fanny, as
+the loveliest young woman for face and person that perhaps in my whole
+life I have beheld, merited the station which even now, from a distance
+of forty years, she holds in my dreams; yes, though by links of natural
+association she brings along with her a troop of dreadful creatures,
+fabulous and not fabulous, that are more abominable to the heart than
+Fanny and the dawn are delightful.
+
+Miss Fanny of the Bath road, strictly speaking, lived at a mile's
+distance from that road, but came so continually to meet the mail that
+I on my frequent transits rarely missed her, and naturally connected her
+image with the great thoroughfare where only I had ever seen her. Why
+she came so punctually I do not exactly know; but I believe with some
+burden of commissions, to be executed in Bath, which had gathered to
+her own residence as a central rendezvous for converging them. The
+mail-coachman who drove the Bath mail and wore the royal livery
+[Footnote: "Wore the royal livery":--The general impression was that
+the royal livery belonged of right to the mail-coachmen as their
+professional dress. But that was an error. To the guard it _did_ belong,
+I believe, and was obviously essential as an official warrant, and as a
+means of instant identification for his person, in the discharge of his
+important public duties. But the coachman, and especially if his place
+in the series did not connect him immediately with London and the
+General Post-Office, obtained the scarlet coat only as an honorary
+distinction after long (or, if not long, trying and special) service.]
+happened to be Fanny's grandfather. A good man he was, that loved his
+beautiful granddaughter, and, loving her wisely, was vigilant over her
+deportment in any case where young Oxford might happen to be concerned.
+Did my vanity then suggest that I myself, individually, could fall
+within the line of his terrors? Certainly not, as regarded any physical
+pretensions that I could plead; for Fanny (as a chance passenger from
+her own neighbourhood once told me) counted in her train a hundred and
+ninety-nine professed admirers, if not open aspirants to her favour; and
+probably not one of the whole brigade but excelled myself in personal
+advantages. Ulysses even, with the unfair advantage of his accursed bow,
+could hardly have undertaken that amount of suitors. So the danger might
+have seemed slight--only that woman is universally aristocratic; it is
+amongst her nobilities of heart that she _is_ so. Now, the aristocratic
+distinctions in my favour might easily with Miss Fanny have compensated
+my physical deficiencies. Did I then make love to Fanny? Why, yes; about
+as much love as one _could_ make whilst the mail was changing horses--a
+process which, ten years later, did not occupy above eighty seconds; but
+_then_,--viz., about Waterloo--it occupied five times eighty. Now, four
+hundred seconds offer a field quite ample enough for whispering into
+a young woman's ear a great deal of truth, and (by way of parenthesis)
+some trifle of falsehood. Grandpapa did right, therefore, to watch me.
+And yet, as happens too often to the grandpapas of earth in a contest
+with the admirers of granddaughters, how vainly would he have watched me
+had I meditated any evil whispers to Fanny! She, it is my belief, would
+have protected herself against any man's evil suggestions. But he, as
+the result showed, could not have intercepted the opportunities for
+such suggestions. Yet, why not? Was he not active? Was he not blooming?
+Blooming he was as Fanny herself.
+
+"Say, all our praises why should lords----"
+
+Stop, that's not the line.
+
+"Say, all our roses why should girls engross?"
+
+The coachman showed rosy blossoms on his face deeper even than his
+granddaughter's--_his_ being drawn from the ale-cask, Fanny's from
+the fountains of the dawn. But, in spite of his blooming face, some
+infirmities he had; and one particularly in which he too much resembled
+a crocodile. This lay in a monstrous inaptitude for turning round. The
+crocodile, I presume, owes that inaptitude to the absurd _length_ of his
+back; but in our grandpapa it arose rather from the absurd _breadth_ of
+his back, combined, possibly, with some growing stiffness in his legs.
+Now, upon this crocodile infirmity of his I planted a human advantage
+for tendering my homage to Miss Fanny. In defiance of all his honourable
+vigilance, no sooner had he presented to us his mighty Jovian back (what
+a field for displaying to mankind his royal scarlet!), whilst inspecting
+professionally the buckles, the straps, and the silvery turrets
+[Footnote: "_Turrets_":--As one who loves and venerates Chaucer for his
+unrivalled merits of tenderness, of picturesque characterisation, and of
+narrative skill, I noticed with great pleasure that the word _torrettes_
+is used by him to designate the little devices through which the reins
+are made to pass. This same word, in the same exact sense, I heard
+uniformly used by many scores of illustrious mail-coachmen to whose
+confidential friendship I had the honour of being admitted in my younger
+days.] of his harness, than I raised Miss Fanny's hand to my lips, and,
+by the mixed tenderness and respectfulness of my manner, caused her
+easily to understand how happy it would make me to rank upon her list
+as No. 10 or 12: in which case a few casualties amongst her lovers (and,
+observe, they _hanged_ liberally in those days) might have promoted me
+speedily to the top of the tree; as, on the other hand, with how
+much loyalty of submission I acquiesced by anticipation in her award,
+supposing that she should plant me in the very rearward of her favour,
+as No. 199 + 1. Most truly I loved this beautiful and ingenuous girl;
+and, had it not been for the Bath mail, timing all courtships by
+post-office allowance, heaven only knows what might have come of it.
+People talk of being over head and ears in love; now, the mail was the
+cause that I sank only over ears in love,--which, you know, still left a
+trifle of brain to overlook the whole conduct of the affair.
+
+Ah, reader! when I look back upon those days, it seems to me that all
+things change--all things perish. "Perish the roses and the palms of
+kings": perish even the crowns and trophies of Waterloo: thunder and
+lightning are not the thunder and lightning which I remember. Roses
+are degenerating. The Fannies of our island--though this I say with
+reluctance--are not visibly improving; and the Bath road is notoriously
+superannuated. Crocodiles, you will say, are stationary. Mr. Waterton
+tells me that the crocodile does _not change_,--that a cayman, in fact,
+or an alligator, is just as good for riding upon as he was in the time
+of the Pharaohs. _That_ may be; but the reason is that the crocodile
+does not live fast--he is a slow coach. I believe it is generally
+understood among naturalists that the crocodile is a blockhead. It is
+my own impression that the Pharaohs were also blockheads. Now, as
+the Pharaohs and the crocodile domineered over Egyptian society, this
+accounts for a singular mistake that prevailed through innumerable
+generations on the Nile. The crocodile made the ridiculous blunder of
+supposing man to be meant chiefly for his own eating. Man, taking a
+different view of the subject, naturally met that mistake by another: he
+viewed the crocodile as a thing sometimes to worship, but always to
+run away from. And this continued till Mr. Waterton [Footnote: "_Mr.
+Waterton_":--Had the reader lived through the last generation, he would
+not need to be told that, some thirty or thirty-five years back,
+Mr. Waterton, a distinguished country gentleman of ancient family in
+Northumberland, publicly mounted and rode in top-boots a savage old
+crocodile, that was restive and very impertinent, but all to no purpose.
+The crocodile jibbed and tried to kick, but vainly. He was no more able
+to throw the squire than Sinbad was to throw the old scoundrel who used
+his back without paying for it, until he discovered a mode (slightly
+immoral, perhaps, though some think not) of murdering the old fraudulent
+jockey, and so circuitously of unhorsing him.] changed the relations
+between the animals. The mode of escaping from the reptile he showed to
+be not by running away, but by leaping on its back booted and spurred.
+The two animals had misunderstood each other. The use of the crocodile
+has now been cleared up--viz., to be ridden; and the final cause of
+man is that he may improve the health of the crocodile by riding him
+a-fox-hunting before breakfast. And it is pretty certain that any
+crocodile who has been regularly hunted through the season, and is
+master of the weight he carries, will take a six-barred gate now as well
+as ever he would have done in the infancy of the pyramids.
+
+If, therefore, the crocodile does _not_ change, all things else
+undeniably _do_: even the shadow of the pyramids grows less. And often
+the restoration in vision of Fanny and the Bath road makes me too
+pathetically sensible of that truth. Out of the darkness, if I happen
+to call back the image of Fanny, up rises suddenly from a gulf of forty
+years a rose in June; or, if I think for an instant of the rose in
+June, up rises the heavenly face of Fanny. One after the other, like the
+antiphonies in the choral service, rise Fanny and the rose in June, then
+back again the rose in June and Fanny. Then come both together, as in
+a chorus--roses and Fannies, Fannies and roses, without end, thick
+as blossoms in paradise. Then comes a venerable crocodile, in a royal
+livery of scarlet and gold, with sixteen capes; and the crocodile is
+driving four-in-hand from the box of the Bath mail. And suddenly we upon
+the mail are pulled up by a mighty dial, sculptured with the hours, that
+mingle with the heavens and the heavenly host. Then all at once we are
+arrived at Marlborough forest, amongst the lovely households [Footnote:
+"_Households_":--Roe-deer do not congregate in herds like the fallow
+or the red deer, but by separate families, parents and children; which
+feature of approximation to the sanctity of human hearths, added to
+their comparatively miniature and graceful proportions, conciliates
+to them an interest of peculiar tenderness, supposing even that this
+beautiful creature is less characteristically impressed with the
+grandeurs of savage and forest life.] of the roe-deer; the deer and
+their fawns retire into the dewy thickets; the thickets are rich with
+roses; once again the roses call up the sweet countenance of Fanny; and
+she, being the granddaughter of a crocodile, awakens a dreadful host of
+semi-legendary animals--griffins, dragons, basilisks, sphinxes--till
+at length the whole vision of fighting images crowds into one towering
+armorial shield, a vast emblazonry of human charities and human
+loveliness that have perished, but quartered heraldically with
+unutterable and demoniac natures, whilst over all rises, as a
+surmounting crest, one fair female hand, with the forefinger pointing,
+in sweet, sorrowful admonition, upwards to heaven, where is sculptured
+the eternal writing which proclaims the frailty of earth and her
+children.
+
+
+GOING DOWN WITH VICTORY
+
+
+But the grandest chapter of our experience within the whole mail-coach
+service was on those occasions when we went down from London with the
+news of victory. A period of about ten years stretched from Trafalgar
+to Waterloo; the second and third years of which period (1806 and
+1807) were comparatively sterile; but the other nine (from 1805 to 1815
+inclusively) furnished a long succession of victories, the least of
+which, in such a contest of Titans, had an inappreciable value of
+position: partly for its absolute interference with the plans of our
+enemy, but still more from its keeping alive through central Europe the
+sense of a deep-seated vulnerability in France. Even to tease the coasts
+of our enemy, to mortify them by continual blockades, to insult them
+by capturing if it were but a baubling schooner under the eyes of their
+arrogant armies, repeated from time to time a sullen proclamation of
+power lodged in one quarter to which the hopes of Christendom turned in
+secret. How much more loudly must this proclamation have spoken in the
+audacity [Footnote: "_Audacity_":--Such the French accounted it; and it
+has struck me that Soult would not have been so popular in London, at
+the period of her present Majesty's coronation, or in Manchester,
+on occasion of his visit to that town, if they had been aware of the
+insolence with which he spoke of us in notes written at intervals from
+the field of Waterloo. As though it had been mere felony in our army
+to look a French one in the face, he said in more notes than one,
+dated from two to four P.M. on the field of Waterloo, "Here are the
+English--we have them; they are caught _en flagrant delit_" Yet no man
+should have known us better; no man had drunk deeper from the cup of
+humiliation than Soult had in 1809, when ejected by us with headlong
+violence from Oporto, and pursued through a long line of wrecks to the
+frontier of Spain; and subsequently at Albuera, in the bloodiest of
+recorded battles, to say nothing of Toulouse, he should have learned our
+pretensions.] of having bearded the _elite_ of their troops, and having
+beaten them in pitched battles! Five years of life it was worth paying
+down for the privilege of an outside place on a mail-coach, when
+carrying down the first tidings of any such event. And it is to be noted
+that, from our insular situation, and the multitude of our frigates
+disposable for the rapid transmission of intelligence, rarely did any
+unauthorised rumour steal away a prelibation from the first aroma of the
+regular despatches. The government news was generally the earliest news.
+
+From eight P.M. to fifteen or twenty minutes later imagine the mails
+assembled on parade in Lombard Street; where, at that time, [Footnote:
+"_At that time_":--I speak of the era previous to Waterloo.] and not in
+St. Martin's-le-Grand, was seated the General Post-Office. In what exact
+strength we mustered I do not remember; but, from the length of each
+separate _attelage_, we filled the street, though a long one, and
+though we were drawn up in double file. On _any_ night the spectacle
+was beautiful. The absolute perfection of all the appointments about the
+carriages and the harness, their strength, their brilliant cleanliness,
+their beautiful simplicity--but, more than all, the royal magnificence
+of the horses--were what might first have fixed the attention. Every
+carriage on every morning in the year was taken down to an official
+inspector for examination: wheels, axles, linchpins, pole, glasses,
+lamps, were all critically probed and tested. Every part of every
+carriage had been cleaned, every horse had been groomed, with as much
+rigour as if they belonged to a private gentleman; and that part of the
+spectacle offered itself always. But the night before us is a night
+of victory; and, behold! to the ordinary display what a heart-shaking
+addition!--horses, men, carriages, all are dressed in laurels and
+flowers, oak-leaves and ribbons. The guards, as being officially his
+Majesty's servants, and of the coachmen such as are within the privilege
+of the post-office, wear the royal liveries of course; and, as it is
+summer (for all the _land_ victories were naturally won in summer), they
+wear, on this fine evening, these liveries exposed to view, without any
+covering of upper coats. Such a costume, and the elaborate arrangement
+of the laurels in their hats, dilate their hearts, by giving to them
+openly a personal connexion with the great news in which already they
+have the general interest of patriotism. That great national sentiment
+surmounts and quells all sense of ordinary distinctions. Those
+passengers who happen to be gentlemen are now hardly to be distinguished
+as such except by dress; for the usual reserve of their manner in
+speaking to the attendants has on this night melted away. One heart,
+one pride, one glory, connects every man by the transcendent bond of
+his national blood. The spectators, who are numerous beyond precedent,
+express their sympathy with these fervent feelings by continual hurrahs.
+Every moment are shouted aloud by the post-office servants, and summoned
+to draw up, the great ancestral names of cities known to history through
+a thousand years--Lincoln, Winchester, Portsmouth, Gloucester, Oxford,
+Bristol, Manchester, York, Newcastle, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Perth,
+Stirling, Aberdeen--expressing the grandeur of the empire by the
+antiquity of its towns, and the grandeur of the mail establishment by
+the diffusive radiation of its separate missions. Every moment you hear
+the thunder of lids locked down upon the mail-bags. That sound to each
+individual mail is the signal for drawing off; which process is the
+finest part of the entire spectacle. Then come the horses into play.
+Horses! can these be horses that bound off with the action and gestures
+of leopards? What stir!--what sea-like ferment!--what a thundering of
+wheels!--what a trampling of hoofs!--what a sounding of trumpets!--what
+farewell cheers--what redoubling peals of brotherly congratulation,
+connecting the name of the particular mail--"Liverpool for ever!"--with
+the name of the particular victory--"Badajoz for ever!" or "Salamanca
+for ever!" The half-slumbering consciousness that all night long, and
+all the next day--perhaps for even a longer period--many of these mails,
+like fire racing along a train of gunpowder, will be kindling at
+every instant new successions of burning joy, has an obscure effect of
+multiplying the victory itself, by multiplying to the imagination into
+infinity the stages of its progressive diffusion. A fiery arrow seems
+to be let loose, which from that moment is destined to travel,
+without intermission, westwards for three hundred [Footnote: "_Three
+hundred_":--Of necessity, this scale of measurement, to an American, if
+he happens to be a thoughtless man, must sound ludicrous. Accordingly,
+I remember a case in which an American writer indulges himself in the
+luxury of a little fibbing, by ascribing to an Englishman a pompous
+account of the Thames, constructed entirely upon American ideas of
+grandeur, and concluding in something like these terms:--"And, sir,
+arriving at London, this mighty father of rivers attains a breadth of
+at least two furlongs, having, in its winding course, traversed the
+astonishing distance of one hundred and seventy miles." And this
+the candid American thinks it fair to contrast with the scale of the
+Mississippi. Now, it is hardly worth while to answer a pure fiction
+gravely; else one might say that no Englishman out of Bedlam ever
+thought of looking in an island for the rivers of a continent, nor,
+consequently, could have thought of looking for the peculiar grandeur of
+the Thames in the length of its course, or in the extent of soil which
+it drains. Yet, if he _had_ been so absurd, the American might have
+recollected that a river, not to be compared with the Thames even as to
+volume of water--viz., the Tiber--has contrived to make itself heard of
+in this world for twenty-five centuries to an extent not reached as
+yet by any river, however corpulent, of his own land. The glory of
+the Thames is measured by the destiny of the population to which it
+ministers, by the commerce which it supports, by the grandeur of the
+empire in which, though far from the largest, it is the most influential
+stream. Upon some such scale, and not by a transfer of Columbian
+standards, is the course of our English mails to be valued. The American
+may fancy the effect of his own valuations to our English ears by
+supposing the case of a Siberian glorifying his country in these
+terms:--"These wretches, sir, in France and England, cannot march half a
+mile in any direction without finding a house where food can be had and
+lodging; whereas such is the noble desolation of our magnificent country
+that in many a direction for a thousand miles I will engage that a dog
+shall not find shelter from a snow-storm, nor a wren find an apology for
+breakfast."] miles--northwards for six hundred; and the sympathy of our
+Lombard Street friends at parting is exalted a hundredfold by a sort of
+visionary sympathy with the yet slumbering sympathies which in so vast a
+succession we are going to awake.
+
+Liberated from the embarrassments of the city, and issuing into the
+broad uncrowded avenues of the northern suburbs, we soon begin to enter
+upon our natural pace of ten miles an hour. In the broad light of the
+summer evening, the sun, perhaps, only just at the point of setting, we
+are seen from every storey of every house. Heads of every age crowd to
+the windows; young and old understand the language of our victorious
+symbols; and rolling volleys of sympathising cheers run along us, behind
+us, and before us. The beggar, rearing himself against the wall, forgets
+his lameness--real or assumed--thinks not of his whining trade, but
+stands erect, with bold exulting smiles, as we pass him. The victory has
+healed him, and says, Be thou whole! Women and children, from garrets
+alike and cellars, through infinite London, look down or look up with
+loving eyes upon our gay ribbons and our martial laurels; sometimes
+kiss their hands; sometimes hang out, as signals of affection,
+pocket-handkerchiefs, aprons, dusters, anything that, by catching the
+summer breezes, will express an aerial jubilation. On the London side of
+Barnet, to which we draw near within a few minutes after nine, observe
+that private carriage which is approaching us. The weather being so
+warm, the glasses are all down; and one may read, as on the stage of a
+theatre, everything that goes on within. It contains three ladies--one
+likely to be "mamma," and two of seventeen or eighteen, who are probably
+her daughters. What lovely animation, what beautiful unpremeditated
+pantomime, explaining to us every syllable that passes, in these
+ingenuous girls! By the sudden start and raising of the hands on first
+discovering our laurelled equipage, by the sudden movement and appeal to
+the elder lady from both of them, and by the heightened colour on their
+animated countenances, we can almost hear them saying, "See, see! Look
+at their laurels! Oh, mamma! there has been a great battle in Spain; and
+it has been a great victory." In a moment we are on the point of passing
+them. We passengers--I on the box, and the two on the roof behind
+me--raise our hats to the ladies; the coachman makes his professional
+salute with the whip; the guard even, though punctilious on the matter
+of his dignity as an officer under the crown, touches his hat. The
+ladies move to us, in return, with a winning graciousness of gesture;
+all smile on each side in a way that nobody could misunderstand, and
+that nothing short of a grand national sympathy could so instantaneously
+prompt. Will these ladies say that we are nothing to _them_? Oh no; they
+will not say _that_. They cannot deny--they do not deny--that for this
+night they are our sisters; gentle or simple, scholar or illiterate
+servant, for twelve hours to come, we on the outside have the honour
+to be their brothers. Those poor women, again, who stop to gaze upon
+us with delight at the entrance of Barnet, and seem, by their air of
+weariness, to be returning from labour--do you mean to say that they are
+washerwomen and charwomen? Oh, my poor friend, you are quite mistaken. I
+assure you they stand in a far higher rank; for this one night they feel
+themselves by birthright to be daughters of England, and answer to no
+humbler title.
+
+Every joy, however, even rapturous joy--such is the sad law of
+earth--may carry with it grief, or fear of grief, to some. Three miles
+beyond Barnet, we see approaching us another private carriage, nearly
+repeating the circumstances of the former case. Here, also, the glasses
+are all down; here, also, is an elderly lady seated; but the two
+daughters are missing; for the single young person sitting by the lady's
+side seems to be an attendant--so I judge from her dress, and her air
+of respectful reserve. The lady is in mourning; and her countenance
+expresses sorrow. At first she does not look up; so that I believe she
+is not aware of our approach, until she hears the measured beating of
+our horses' hoofs. Then she raises her eyes to settle them painfully on
+our triumphal equipage. Our decorations explain the case to her at once;
+but she beholds them with apparent anxiety, or even with terror. Some
+time before this, I, finding it difficult to hit a flying mark when
+embarrassed by the coachman's person and reins intervening, had given
+to the guard a "Courier" evening paper, containing the gazette, for the
+next carriage that might pass. Accordingly he tossed it in, so folded
+that the huge capitals expressing some such legend as GLORIOUS VICTORY
+might catch the eye at once. To see the paper, however, at all,
+interpreted as it was by our ensigns of triumph, explained everything;
+and, if the guard were right in thinking the lady to have received it
+with a gesture of horror, it could not be doubtful that she had suffered
+some deep personal affliction in connexion with this Spanish war.
+
+Here, now, was the case of one who, having formerly suffered, might,
+erroneously perhaps, be distressing herself with anticipations of
+another similar suffering. That same night, and hardly three hours
+later, occurred the reverse case. A poor woman, who too probably
+would find herself, in a day or two, to have suffered the heaviest
+of afflictions by the battle, blindly allowed herself to express an
+exultation so unmeasured in the news and its details as gave to her the
+appearance which amongst Celtic Highlanders is called _fey_. This was at
+some little town where we changed horses an hour or two after midnight.
+Some fair or wake had kept the people up out of their beds, and had
+occasioned a partial illumination of the stalls and booths, presenting
+an unusual but very impressive effect. We saw many lights moving about
+as we drew near; and perhaps the most striking scene on the whole
+route was our reception at this place. The flashing of torches and the
+beautiful radiance of blue lights (technically, Bengal lights) upon
+the heads of our horses; the fine effect of such a showery and ghostly
+illumination falling upon our flowers and glittering laurels [Footnote:
+"_Glittering laurels_":--I must observe that the colour of _green_
+suffers almost a spiritual change and exaltation under the effect of
+Bengal lights.]; whilst all around ourselves, that formed a centre of
+light, the darkness gathered on the rear and flanks in massy blackness:
+these optical splendours, together with the prodigious enthusiasm of the
+people, composed a picture at once scenical and affecting, theatrical
+and holy. As we staid for three or four minutes, I alighted; and
+immediately from a dismantled stall in the street, where no doubt she
+had been presiding through the earlier part of the night, advanced
+eagerly a middle-aged woman. The sight of my newspaper it was that had
+drawn her attention upon myself. The victory which we were carrying
+down to the provinces on _this_ occasion was the imperfect one of
+Talavera--imperfect for its results, such was the virtual treachery of
+the Spanish general, Cuesta, but not imperfect in its ever-memorable
+heroism. I told her the main outline of the battle. The agitation of
+her enthusiasm had been so conspicuous when listening, and when first
+applying for information, that I could not but ask her if she had not
+some relative in the Peninsular army. Oh yes; her only son was there.
+In what regiment? He was a trooper in the 23d Dragoons. My heart sank
+within me as she made that answer. This sublime regiment, which an
+Englishman should never mention without raising his hat to their memory,
+had made the most memorable and effective charge recorded in military
+annals. They leaped their horses--_over_ a trench where they could;
+_into_ it, and with the result of death or mutilation, when they could
+_not_. What proportion cleared the trench is nowhere stated. Those
+who _did_ closed up and went down upon the enemy with such divinity of
+fervour (I use the word _divinity_ by design: the inspiration of God
+must have prompted this movement for those whom even then He was calling
+to His presence) that two results followed. As regarded the enemy, this
+23d Dragoons, not, I believe, originally three hundred and fifty strong,
+paralysed a French column six thousand strong, then ascended the hill,
+and fixed the gaze of the whole French army. As regarded themselves,
+the 23d were supposed at first to have been barely not annihilated; but
+eventually, I believe, about one in four survived. And this, then, was
+the regiment--a regiment already for some hours glorified and hallowed
+to the ear of all London, as lying stretched, by a large majority, upon
+one bloody aceldama--in which the young trooper served whose mother was
+now talking in a spirit of such joyous enthusiasm. Did I tell her the
+truth? Had I the heart to break up her dreams? No. To-morrow, said I
+to myself--to-morrow, or the next day, will publish the worst. For one
+night more wherefore should she not sleep in peace? After to-morrow
+the chances are too many that peace will forsake her pillow. This brief
+respite, then, let her owe to _my_ gift and _my_ forbearance. But, if I
+told her not of the bloody price that had been paid, not therefore was
+I silent on the contributions from her son's regiment to that day's
+service and glory. I showed her not the funeral banners under which the
+noble regiment was sleeping. I lifted not the overshadowing laurels from
+the bloody trench in which horse and rider lay mangled together. But I
+told her how these dear children of England, officers and privates,
+had leaped their horses over all obstacles as gaily as hunters to the
+morning's chase. I told her how they rode their horses into the midst of
+death,--saying to myself, but not saying to _her_ "and laid down their
+young lives for thee, O mother England! as willingly--poured out their
+noble blood as cheerfully--as ever, after a long day's sport, when
+infants, they had rested their weary heads upon their mother's knees, or
+had sunk to sleep in her arms." Strange it is, yet true, that she seemed
+to have no fears for her son's safety, even after this knowledge
+that the 23d Dragoons had been memorably engaged; but so much was she
+enraptured by the knowledge that _his_ regiment, and therefore that
+_he_, had rendered conspicuous service in the dreadful conflict--a
+service which had actually made them, within the last twelve hours,
+the foremost topic of conversation in London--so absolutely was fear
+swallowed up in joy--that, in the mere simplicity of her fervent nature,
+the poor woman threw her arms round my neck, as she thought of her son,
+and gave to _me_ the kiss which secretly was meant for _him_.
+
+
+SECTION II--THE VISION OF SUDDEN DEATH
+
+
+What is to be taken as the predominant opinion of man, reflective and
+philosophic, upon SUDDEN DEATH? It is remarkable that, in different
+conditions of society, sudden death has been variously regarded as the
+consummation of an earthly career most fervently to be desired, or,
+again, as that consummation which is with most horror to be deprecated.
+Caesar the Dictator, at his last dinner-party (_coena_), on the very
+evening before his assassination, when the minutes of his earthly career
+were numbered, being asked what death, in _his_ judgment, might be
+pronounced the most eligible, replied "That which should be most
+sudden." On the other hand, the divine Litany of our English Church,
+when breathing forth supplications, as if in some representative
+character, for the whole human race prostrate before God, places such
+a death in the very van of horrors: "From lightning and tempest; from
+plague, pestilence, and famine; from battle and murder, and from SUDDEN
+DEATH--_Good Lord, deliver us_." Sudden death is here made to crown the
+climax in a grand ascent of calamities; it is ranked among the last of
+curses; and yet by the noblest of Romans it was ranked as the first of
+blessings. In that difference most readers will see little more than
+the essential difference between Christianity and Paganism. But this,
+on consideration, I doubt. The Christian Church may be right in its
+estimate of sudden death; and it is a natural feeling, though after all
+it may also be an infirm one, to wish for a quiet dismissal from
+life, as that which _seems_ most reconcilable with meditation, with
+penitential retrospects, and with the humilities of farewell prayer.
+There does not, however, occur to me any direct scriptural warrant for
+this earnest petition of the English Litany, unless under a special
+construction of the word "sudden." It seems a petition indulged rather
+and conceded to human infirmity than exacted from human piety. It is not
+so much a doctrine built upon the eternities of the Christian system
+as a plausible opinion built upon special varieties of physical
+temperament. Let that, however, be as it may, two remarks suggest
+themselves as prudent restraints upon a doctrine which else _may_
+wander, and _has_ wandered, into an uncharitable superstition. The
+first is this: that many people are likely to exaggerate the horror of
+a sudden death from the disposition to lay a false stress upon words
+or acts simply because by an accident they have become _final_ words or
+acts. If a man dies, for instance, by some sudden death when he happens
+to be intoxicated, such a death is falsely regarded with peculiar
+horror; as though the intoxication were suddenly exalted into a
+blasphemy. But _that_ is unphilosophic. The man was, or he was not,
+_habitually_ a drunkard. If not, if his intoxication were a solitary
+accident, there can be no reason for allowing special emphasis to this
+act simply because through misfortune it became his final act. Nor,
+on the other hand, if it were no accident, but one of his _habitual_
+transgressions, will it be the more habitual or the more a transgression
+because some sudden calamity, surprising him, has caused this habitual
+transgression to be also a final one. Could the man have had any reason
+even dimly to foresee his own sudden death, there would have been a
+new feature in his act of intemperance--a feature of presumption and
+irreverence, as in one that, having known himself drawing near to the
+presence of God, should have suited his demeanour to an expectation
+so awful. But this is no part of the case supposed. And the only new
+element in the man's act is not any element of special immorality, but
+simply of special misfortune.
+
+The other remark has reference to the meaning of the word _sudden_.
+Very possibly Caesar and the Christian Church do not differ in the way
+supposed,--that is, do not differ by any difference of doctrine as
+between Pagan and Christian views of the moral temper appropriate
+to death; but perhaps they are contemplating different cases. Both
+contemplate a violent death, a _Biathanatos_--death that is _biaios_,
+or, in other words, death that is brought about, not by internal and
+spontaneous change, but by active force having its origin from without.
+In this meaning the two authorities agree. Thus far they are in
+harmony. But the difference is that the Roman by the word "sudden" means
+_unlingering_, whereas the Christian Litany by "sudden death" means a
+death _without warning_, consequently without any available summons to
+religious preparation. The poor mutineer who kneels down to gather into
+his heart the bullets from twelve firelocks of his pitying comrades dies
+by a most sudden death in Caesar's sense; one shock, one mighty spasm,
+one (possibly _not_ one) groan, and all is over. But, in the sense
+of the Litany, the mutineer's death is far from sudden: his offence
+originally, his imprisonment, his trial, the interval between his
+sentence and its execution, having all furnished him with separate
+warnings of his fate--having all summoned him to meet it with solemn
+preparation.
+
+Here at once, in this sharp verbal distinction, we comprehend the
+faithful earnestness with which a holy Christian Church pleads on behalf
+of her poor departing children that God would vouchsafe to them the
+last great privilege and distinction possible on a death-bed, viz.,
+the opportunity of untroubled preparation for facing this mighty trial.
+Sudden death, as a mere variety in the modes of dying where death in
+some shape is inevitable, proposes a question of choice which, equally
+in the Roman and the Christian sense, will be variously answered
+according to each man's variety of temperament. Meantime, one aspect of
+sudden death there is, one modification, upon which no doubt can
+arise, that of all martyrdoms it is the most agitating--viz., where it
+surprises a man under circumstances which offer (or which seem to offer)
+some hurrying, flying, inappreciably minute chance of evading it. Sudden
+as the danger which it affronts must be any effort by which such an
+evasion can be accomplished. Even _that_, even the sickening necessity
+for hurrying in extremity where all hurry seems destined to be
+vain,--even that anguish is liable to a hideous exasperation in one
+particular case: viz., where the appeal is made not exclusively to the
+instinct of self-preservation, but to the conscience, on behalf of some
+other life besides your own, accidentally thrown upon _your_ protection.
+To fail, to collapse in a service merely your own, might seem
+comparatively venial; though, in fact, it is far from venial. But to
+fail in a case where Providence has suddenly thrown into your hands the
+final interests of another,--a fellow creature shuddering between the
+gates of life and death: this, to a man of apprehensive conscience,
+would mingle the misery of an atrocious criminality with the misery of a
+bloody calamity. You are called upon, by the case supposed, possibly to
+die, but to die at the very moment when, by any even partial failure or
+effeminate collapse of your energies, you will be self-denounced as a
+murderer. You had but the twinkling of an eye for your effort, and that
+effort might have been unavailing; but to have risen to the level of
+such an effort would have rescued you, though not from dying, yet from
+dying as a traitor to your final and farewell duty.
+
+The situation here contemplated exposes a dreadful ulcer, lurking far
+down in the depths of human nature. It is not that men generally are
+summoned to face such awful trials. But potentially, and in shadowy
+outline, such a trial is moving subterraneously in perhaps all men's
+natures. Upon the secret mirror of our dreams such a trial is darkly
+projected, perhaps, to every one of us. That dream, so familiar to
+childhood, of meeting a lion, and, through languishing prostration in
+hope and the energies of hope, that constant sequel of lying down before
+the lion publishes the secret frailty of human nature--reveals its
+deep-seated falsehood to itself--records its abysmal treachery. Perhaps
+not one of us escapes that dream; perhaps, as by some sorrowful doom of
+man, that dream repeats for every one of us, through every generation,
+the original temptation in Eden. Every one of us, in this dream, has a
+bait offered to the infirm places of his own individual will; once again
+a snare is presented for tempting him into captivity to a luxury of
+ruin; once again, as in aboriginal Paradise, the man falls by his
+own choice; again, by infinite iteration, the ancient earth groans
+to Heaven, through her secret caves, over the weakness of her child.
+"Nature, from her seat, sighing through all her works," again "gives
+signs of woe that all is lost"; and again the counter-sigh is repeated
+to the sorrowing heavens for the endless rebellion against God. It is
+not without probability that in the world of dreams every one of us
+ratifies for himself the original transgression. In dreams, perhaps
+under some secret conflict of the midnight sleeper, lighted up to the
+consciousness at the time, but darkened to the memory as soon as all
+is finished, each several child of our mysterious race completes for
+himself the treason of the aboriginal fall.
+
+The incident, so memorable in itself by its features of horror, and so
+scenical by its grouping for the eye, which furnished the text for this
+reverie upon _Sudden Death_ occurred to myself in the dead of night,
+as a solitary spectator, when seated on the box of the Manchester and
+Glasgow mail, in the second or third summer after Waterloo. I find it
+necessary to relate the circumstances, because they are such as could
+not have occurred unless under a singular combination of accidents.
+In those days, the oblique and lateral communications with many rural
+post-offices were so arranged, either through necessity or through
+defect of system, as to make it requisite for the main north-western
+mail (_i.e._, the _down_ mail) on reaching Manchester to halt for a
+number of hours; how many, I do not remember; six or seven, I think; but
+the result was that, in the ordinary course, the mail recommenced its
+journey northwards about midnight. Wearied with the long detention at a
+gloomy hotel, I walked out about eleven o'clock at night for the sake
+of fresh air; meaning to fall in with the mail and resume my seat at
+the post-office. The night, however, being yet dark, as the moon had
+scarcely risen, and the streets being at that hour empty, so as to offer
+no opportunities for asking the road, I lost my way, and did not reach
+the post-office until it was considerably past midnight; but, to my
+great relief (as it was important for me to be in Westmoreland by the
+morning), I saw in the huge saucer eyes of the mail, blazing through
+the gloom, an evidence that my chance was not yet lost. Past the time
+it was; but, by some rare accident, the mail was not even yet ready to
+start. I ascended to my seat on the box, where my cloak was still lying
+as it had lain at the Bridgewater Arms. I had left it there in imitation
+of a nautical discoverer, who leaves a bit of bunting on the shore of
+his discovery, by way of warning off the ground the whole human race,
+and notifying to the Christian and the heathen worlds, with his best
+compliments, that he has hoisted his pocket-handkerchief once and for
+ever upon that virgin soil: thenceforward claiming the _jus dominii_ to
+the top of the atmosphere above it, and also the right of driving shafts
+to the centre of the earth below it; so that all people found after this
+warning either aloft in upper chambers of the atmosphere, or groping
+in subterraneous shafts, or squatting audaciously on the surface of
+the soil, will be treated as trespassers--kicked, that is to say,
+or decapitated, as circumstances may suggest, by their very faithful
+servant, the owner of the said pocket-handkerchief. In the present case,
+it is probable that my cloak might not have been respected, and the
+_jus gentium_ might have been cruelly violated in my person--for, in
+the dark, people commit deeds of darkness, gas being a great ally of
+morality; but it so happened that on this night there was no other
+outside passenger; and thus the crime, which else was but too probable,
+missed fire for want of a criminal.
+
+Having mounted the box, I took a small quantity of laudanum, having
+already travelled two hundred and fifty miles--viz., from a point
+seventy miles beyond London. In the taking of laudanum there was nothing
+extraordinary. But by accident it drew upon me the special attention
+of my assessor on the box, the coachman. And in _that_ also there was
+nothing extraordinary. But by accident, and with great delight, it drew
+my own attention to the fact that this coachman was a monster in point
+of bulk, and that he had but one eye. In fact, he had been foretold by
+Virgil as
+
+  "Monstrum horrendum, informe, ingens, cui lumen ademptum."
+
+He answered to the conditions in every one of the items:--1, a monster
+he was; 2, dreadful; 3, shapeless; 4, huge; 5, who had lost an eye. But
+why should _that_ delight me? Had he been one of the Calendars in the
+"Arabian Nights," and had paid down his eye as the price of his criminal
+curiosity, what right had _I_ to exult in his misfortune? I did _not_
+exult; I delighted in no man's punishment, though it were even merited.
+But these personal distinctions (Nos. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5) identified in an
+instant an old friend of mine whom I had known in the south for some
+years as the most masterly of mail-coachmen. He was the man in all
+Europe that could (if _any_ could) have driven six-in-hand full
+gallop over _Al Sirat_--that dreadful bridge of Mahomet, with no side
+battlements, and of _extra_ room not enough for a razor's edge--leading
+right across the bottomless gulf. Under this eminent man, whom in Greek
+I cognominated Cyclops _Diphrelates_ (Cyclops the Charioteer), I, and
+others known to me, studied the diphrelatic art. Excuse, reader, a word
+too elegant to be pedantic. As a pupil, though I paid extra fees, it is
+to be lamented that I did not stand high in his esteem. It showed his
+dogged honesty (though, observe, not his discernment) that he could
+not see my merits. Let us excuse his absurdity in this particular by
+remembering his want of an eye. Doubtless _that_ made him blind to my
+merits. In the art of conversation, however, he admitted that I had the
+whip-hand of him. On the present occasion great joy was at our meeting.
+But what was Cyclops doing here? Had the medical men recommended
+northern air, or how? I collected, from such explanations as he
+volunteered, that he had an interest at stake in some suit-at-law now
+pending at Lancaster; so that probably he had got himself transferred
+to this station for the purpose of connecting with his professional
+pursuits an instant readiness for the calls of his lawsuit.
+
+Meantime, what are we stopping for? Surely we have now waited long
+enough. Oh, this procrastinating mail, and this procrastinating
+post-office! Can't they take a lesson upon that subject from _me_? Some
+people have called _me_ procrastinating. Yet you are witness, reader,
+that I was here kept waiting for the post-office. Will the post-office
+lay its hand on its heart, in its moments of sobriety, and assert that
+ever it waited for me? What are they about? The guard tells me that
+there is a large extra accumulation of foreign mails this night, owing
+to irregularities caused by war, by wind, by weather, in the packet
+service, which as yet does not benefit at all by steam. For an _extra_
+hour, it seems, the post-office has been engaged in threshing out the
+pure wheaten correspondence of Glasgow, and winnowing it from the chaff
+of all baser intermediate towns. But at last all is finished. Sound your
+horn, guard! Manchester, good-bye! we've lost an hour by your criminal
+conduct at the post-office: which, however, though I do not mean to part
+with a serviceable ground of complaint, and one which really _is_ such
+for the horses, to me secretly is an advantage, since it compels us to
+look sharply for this lost hour amongst the next eight or nine, and to
+recover it (if we can) at the rate of one mile extra per hour. Off we
+are at last, and at eleven miles an hour; and for the moment I detect no
+changes in the energy or in the skill of Cyclops.
+
+From Manchester to Kendal, which virtually (though not in law) is the
+capital of Westmoreland, there were at this time seven stages of eleven
+miles each. The first five of these, counting from Manchester, terminate
+in Lancaster; which is therefore fifty-five miles north of Manchester,
+and the same distance exactly from Liverpool. The first three stages
+terminate in Preston (called, by way of distinction from other towns
+of that name, _Proud_ Preston); at which place it is that the separate
+roads from Liverpool and from Manchester to the north become confluent.
+[Footnote: "_Confluent_":--Suppose a capital Y (the Pythagorean letter):
+Lancaster is at the foot of this letter; Liverpool at the top of the
+_right_ branch; Manchester at the top of the _left_; Proud Preston at
+the centre, where the two branches unite. It is thirty-three miles
+along either of the two branches; it is twenty-two miles along the
+stem,--viz., from Preston in the middle to Lancaster at the root.
+There's a lesson in geography for the reader!] Within these first three
+stages lay the foundation, the progress, and termination of our night's
+adventure. During the first stage, I found out that Cyclops was
+mortal: he was liable to the shocking affection of sleep--a thing which
+previously I had never suspected. If a man indulges in the vicious habit
+of sleeping, all the skill in aurigation of Apollo himself, with the
+horses of Aurora to execute his notions, avails him nothing. "Oh,
+Cyclops!" I exclaimed, "thou art mortal. My friend, thou snorest."
+Through the first eleven miles, however, this infirmity--which I grieve
+to say that he shared with the whole Pagan Pantheon--betrayed itself
+only by brief snatches. On waking up, he made an apology for himself
+which, instead of mending matters, laid open a gloomy vista of coming
+disasters. The summer assizes, he reminded me, were now going on at
+Lancaster: in consequence of which for three nights and three days he
+had not lain down on a bed. During the day he was waiting for his own
+summons as a witness on the trial in which he was interested, or else,
+lest he should be missing at the critical moment, was drinking with the
+other witnesses under the pastoral surveillance of the attorneys. During
+the night, or that part of it which at sea would form the middle watch,
+he was driving. This explanation certainly accounted for his drowsiness,
+but in a way which made it much more alarming; since now, after several
+days' resistance to this infirmity, at length he was steadily giving
+way. Throughout the second stage he grew more and more drowsy. In
+the second mile of the third stage he surrendered himself finally and
+without a struggle to his perilous temptation. All his past resistance
+had but deepened the weight of this final oppression. Seven atmospheres
+of sleep rested upon him; and, to consummate the case, our worthy guard,
+after singing "Love amongst the Roses" for perhaps thirty times, without
+invitation and without applause, had in revenge moodily resigned himself
+to slumber--not so deep, doubtless, as the coachman's, but deep enough
+for mischief. And thus at last, about ten miles from Preston, it came
+about that I found myself left in charge of his Majesty's London and
+Glasgow mail, then running at the least twelve miles an hour.
+
+What made this negligence less criminal than else it must have been
+thought was the condition of the roads at night during the assizes.
+At that time, all the law business of populous Liverpool, and also of
+populous Manchester, with its vast cincture of populous rural districts,
+was called up by ancient usage to the tribunal of Lilliputian Lancaster.
+To break up this old traditional usage required, 1, a conflict with
+powerful established interests, 2, a large system of new arrangements,
+and 3, a new parliamentary statute. But as yet this change was merely in
+contemplation. As things were at present, twice in the year [Footnote:
+"_Twice in the year_":--There were at that time only two assizes even
+in the most populous counties--viz., the Lent Assizes and the Summer
+Assizes.] so vast a body of business rolled northwards from the southern
+quarter of the county that for a fortnight at least it occupied the
+severe exertions of two judges in its despatch. The consequence of this
+was that every horse available for such a service, along the whole line
+of road, was exhausted in carrying down the multitudes of people who
+were parties to the different suits. By sunset, therefore, it usually
+happened that, through utter exhaustion amongst men and horses, the road
+sank into profound silence. Except the exhaustion in the vast adjacent
+county of York from a contested election, no such silence succeeding to
+no such fiery uproar was ever witnessed in England.
+
+On this occasion the usual silence and solitude prevailed along the
+road. Not a hoof nor a wheel was to be heard. And, to strengthen this
+false luxurious confidence in the noiseless roads, it happened also
+that the night was one of peculiar solemnity and peace. For my own
+part, though slightly alive to the possibilities of peril, I had so far
+yielded to the influence of the mighty calm as to sink into a profound
+reverie. The month was August; in the middle of which lay my own
+birthday--a festival to every thoughtful man suggesting solemn and often
+sigh-born [Footnote: "_Sigh-born_":--I owe the suggestion of this
+word to an obscure remembrance of a beautiful phrase in "Giraldus
+Cambrensis"--viz., _suspiriosae cogitationes_.] thoughts. The county was
+my own native county--upon which, in its southern section, more than
+upon any equal area known to man past or present, had descended the
+original curse of labour in its heaviest form, not mastering the bodies
+only of men, as of slaves, or criminals in mines, but working through
+the fiery will. Upon no equal space of earth was, or ever had been, the
+same energy of human power put forth daily. At this particular season
+also of the assizes, that dreadful hurricane of flight and pursuit, as
+it might have seemed to a stranger, which swept to and from Lancaster
+all day long, hunting the county up and down, and regularly subsiding
+back into silence about sunset, could not fail (when united with this
+permanent distinction of Lancashire as the very metropolis and citadel
+of labour) to point the thoughts pathetically upon that counter-vision
+of rest, of saintly repose from strife and sorrow, towards which, as
+to their secret haven, the profounder aspirations of man's heart are in
+solitude continually travelling. Obliquely upon our left we were nearing
+the sea; which also must, under the present circumstances, be repeating
+the general state of halcyon repose. The sea, the atmosphere, the light,
+bore each an orchestral part in this universal lull. Moonlight and the
+first timid tremblings of the dawn were by this time blending; and the
+blendings were brought into a still more exquisite state of unity by a
+slight silvery mist, motionless and dreamy, that covered the woods and
+fields, but with a veil of equable transparency. Except the feet of
+our own horses,--which, running on a sandy margin of the road, made but
+little disturbance,--there was no sound abroad. In the clouds and on the
+earth prevailed the same majestic peace; and, in spite of all that
+the villain of a schoolmaster has done for the ruin of our sublimer
+thoughts, which are the thoughts of our infancy, we still believe in no
+such nonsense as a limited atmosphere. Whatever we may swear with our
+false feigning lips, in our faithful hearts we still believe, and must
+for ever believe, in fields of air traversing the total gulf between
+earth and the central heavens. Still, in the confidence of children that
+tread without fear every chamber in their father's house, and to whom no
+door is closed, we, in that Sabbatic vision which sometimes is revealed
+for an hour upon nights like this, ascend with easy steps from the
+sorrow-stricken fields of earth upwards to the sandals of God.
+
+Suddenly, from thoughts like these I was awakened to a sullen sound, as
+of some motion on the distant road. It stole upon the air for a moment;
+I listened in awe; but then it died away. Once roused, however, I could
+not but observe with alarm the quickened motion of our horses. Ten
+years' experience had made my eye learned in the valuing of motion; and
+I saw that we were now running thirteen miles an hour. I pretend to no
+presence of mind. On the contrary, my fear is that I am miserably and
+shamefully deficient in that quality as regards action. The palsy of
+doubt and distraction hangs like some guilty weight of dark unfathomed
+remembrances upon my energies when the signal is flying for _action_.
+But, on the other hand, this accursed gift I have, as regards _thought_,
+that in the first step towards the possibility of a misfortune I see its
+total evolution; in the radix of the series I see too certainly and too
+instantly its entire expansion; in the first syllable of the dreadful
+sentence I read already the last. It was not that I feared for
+ourselves. _Us_ our bulk and impetus charmed against peril in any
+collision. And I had ridden through too many hundreds of perils that
+were frightful to approach, that were matter of laughter to look back
+upon, the first face of which was horror, the parting face a jest--for
+any anxiety to rest upon _our_ interests. The mail was not built, I
+felt assured, nor bespoke, that could betray _me_ who trusted to its
+protection. But any carriage that we could meet would be frail and light
+in comparison of ourselves. And I remarked this ominous accident of our
+situation,--we were on the wrong side of the road. But then, it may be
+said, the other party, if other there was, might also be on the wrong
+side; and two wrongs might make a right. _That_ was not likely. The same
+motive which had drawn _us_ to the right-hand side of the road--viz.,
+the luxury of the soft beaten sand as contrasted with the paved
+centre--would prove attractive to others. The two adverse carriages
+would therefore, to a certainty, be travelling on the same side; and
+from this side, as not being ours in law, the crossing over to the other
+would, of course, be looked for from _us_. [Footnote: It is true that,
+according to the law of the case as established by legal precedents,
+all carriages were required to give way before royal equipages, and
+therefore before the mail as one of them. But this only increased
+the danger, as being a regulation very imperfectly made known, very
+unequally enforced, and therefore often embarrassing the movements on
+both sides.] Our lamps, still lighted, would give the impression of
+vigilance on our part. And every creature that met us would rely upon
+_us_ for quartering. [Footnote: "_Quartering_":--This is the technical
+word, and, I presume, derived from the French _cartayer_, to evade a
+rut or any obstacle.] All this, and if the separate links of the
+anticipation had been a thousand times more, I saw, not discursively,
+or by effort, or by succession, but by one flash of horrid simultaneous
+intuition.
+
+Under this steady though rapid anticipation of the evil which _might_ be
+gathering ahead, ah! what a sullen mystery of fear, what a sigh of woe,
+was that which stole upon the air, as again the far-off sound of a
+wheel was heard! A whisper it was--a whisper from, perhaps, four miles
+off--secretly announcing a ruin that, being foreseen, was not the less
+inevitable; that, being known, was not therefore healed. What could be
+done--who was it that could do it--to check the storm-flight of these
+maniacal horses? Could I not seize the reins from the grasp of the
+slumbering coachman? You, reader, think that it would have been in
+_your_ power to do so. And I quarrel not with your estimate of yourself.
+But, from the way in which the coachman's hand was viced between his
+upper and lower thigh, this was impossible. Easy was it? See, then,
+that bronze equestrian statue. The cruel rider has kept the bit in
+his horse's mouth for two centuries. Unbridle him for a minute, if you
+please, and wash his mouth with water. Easy was it? Unhorse me, then,
+that imperial rider; knock me those marble feet from those marble
+stirrups of Charlemagne.
+
+The sounds ahead strengthened, and were now too clearly the sounds of
+wheels. Who and what could it be? Was it industry in a taxed cart? Was
+it youthful gaiety in a gig? Was it sorrow that loitered, or joy that
+raced? For as yet the snatches of sound were too intermitting, from
+distance, to decipher the character of the motion. Whoever were the
+travellers, something must be done to warn them. Upon the other party
+rests the active responsibility, but upon _us_--and, woe is me!
+that _us_ was reduced to my frail opium-shattered self--rests the
+responsibility of warning. Yet, how should this be accomplished? Might I
+not sound the guard's horn? Already, on the first thought, I was making
+my way over the roof of the guard's seat. But this, from the accident
+which I have mentioned, of the foreign mails being piled upon the roof,
+was a difficult and even dangerous attempt to one cramped by nearly
+three hundred miles of outside travelling. And, fortunately, before I
+had lost much time in the attempt, our frantic horses swept round
+an angle of the road which opened upon us that final stage where the
+collision must be accomplished and the catastrophe sealed. All was
+apparently finished. The court was sitting; the case was heard; the
+judge had finished; and only the verdict was yet in arrear.
+
+Before us lay an avenue straight as an arrow, six hundred yards,
+perhaps, in length; and the umbrageous trees, which rose in a regular
+line from either side, meeting high overhead, gave to it the character
+of a cathedral aisle. These trees lent a deeper solemnity to the early
+light; but there was still light enough to perceive, at the further end
+of this Gothic aisle, a frail reedy gig, in which were seated a young
+man, and by his side a young lady. Ah, young sir! what are you about?
+If it is requisite that you should whisper your communications to this
+young lady--though really I see nobody, at an hour and on a road so
+solitary, likely to overhear you--is it therefore requisite that you
+should carry your lips forward to hers? The little carriage is creeping
+on at one mile an hour; and the parties within it, being thus tenderly
+engaged, are naturally bending down their heads. Between them and
+eternity, to all human calculation, there is but a minute and a half. Oh
+heavens! what is it that I shall do? Speaking or acting, what help can
+I offer? Strange it is, and to a mere auditor of the tale might seem
+laughable, that I should need a suggestion from the "Iliad" to prompt
+the sole resource that remained. Yet so it was. Suddenly I remembered
+the shout of Achilles, and its effect. But could I pretend to shout like
+the son of Peleus, aided by Pallas? No: but then I needed not the shout
+that should alarm all Asia militant; such a shout would suffice as might
+carry terror into the hearts of two thoughtless young people and one
+gig-horse. I shouted--and the young man heard me not. A second time I
+shouted--and now he heard me, for now he raised his head.
+
+Here, then, all had been done that, by me, _could_ be done; more on _my_
+part was not possible. Mine had been the first step; the second was for
+the young man; the third was for God. If, said I, this stranger is a
+brave man, and if indeed he loves the young girl at his side--or, loving
+her not, if he feels the obligation, pressing upon every man worthy
+to be called a man, of doing his utmost for a woman confided to his
+protection--he will at least make some effort to save her. If _that_
+fails, he will not perish the more, or by a death more cruel, for having
+made it; and he will die as a brave man should, with his face to the
+danger, and with his arm about the woman that he sought in vain to
+save. But, if he makes no effort,--shrinking without a struggle from his
+duty,--he himself will not the less certainly perish for this baseness
+of poltroonery. He will die no less: and why not? Wherefore should we
+grieve that there is one craven less in the world? No; _let_ him perish,
+without a pitying thought of ours wasted upon him; and, in that case,
+all our grief will be reserved for the fate of the helpless girl who
+now, upon the least shadow of failure in _him_, must by the fiercest
+of translations--must without time for a prayer--must within seventy
+seconds stand before the judgment-seat of God.
+
+But craven he was not: sudden had been the call upon him, and sudden was
+his answer to the call. He saw, he heard, he comprehended, the ruin
+that was coming down: already its gloomy shadow darkened above him; and
+already he was measuring his strength to deal with it. Ah! what a vulgar
+thing does courage seem when we see nations buying it and selling it for
+a shilling a-day: ah! what a sublime thing does courage seem when some
+fearful summons on the great deeps of life carries a man, as if running
+before a hurricane, up to the giddy crest of some tumultuous crisis from
+which lie two courses, and a voice says to him audibly, "One way lies
+hope; take the other, and mourn for ever!" How grand a triumph if, even
+then, amidst the raving of all around him, and the frenzy of the danger,
+the man is able to confront his situation--is able to retire for a
+moment into solitude with God, and to seek his counsel from _Him!_
+
+For seven seconds, it might be, of his seventy, the stranger settled his
+countenance steadfastly upon us, as if to search and value every element
+in the conflict before him. For five seconds more of his seventy he sat
+immovably, like one that mused on some great purpose. For five more,
+perhaps, he sat with eyes upraised, like one that prayed in sorrow,
+under some extremity of doubt, for light that should guide him to the
+better choice. Then suddenly he rose; stood upright; and, by a powerful
+strain upon the reins, raising his horse's fore-feet from the ground,
+he slewed him round on the pivot of his hind-legs, so as to plant the
+little equipage in a position nearly at right angles to ours. Thus far
+his condition was not improved; except as a first step had been taken
+towards the possibility of a second. If no more were done, nothing was
+done; for the little carriage still occupied the very centre of our
+path, though in an altered direction. Yet even now it may not be too
+late: fifteen of the seventy seconds may still be unexhausted; and one
+almighty bound may avail to clear the ground. Hurry, then, hurry! for
+the flying moments--_they_ hurry. Oh, hurry, hurry, my brave young
+man! for the cruel hoofs of our horses--_they_ also hurry! Fast are the
+flying moments, faster are the hoofs of our horses. But fear not for
+_him_, if human energy can suffice; faithful was he that drove to his
+terrific duty; faithful was the horse to _his_ command. One blow, one
+impulse given with voice and hand, by the stranger, one rush from the
+horse, one bound as if in the act of rising to a fence, landed the
+docile creature's forefeet upon the crown or arching centre of the
+road. The larger half of the little equipage had then cleared our
+over-towering shadow: _that_ was evident even to my own agitated sight.
+But it mattered little that one wreck should float off in safety if upon
+the wreck that perished were embarked the human freightage. The rear
+part of the carriage--was _that_ certainly beyond the line of absolute
+ruin? What power could answer the question? Glance of eye, thought of
+man, wing of angel, which of these had speed enough to sweep between the
+question and the answer, and divide the one from the other? Light
+does not tread upon the steps of light more indivisibly than did our
+all-conquering arrival upon the escaping efforts of the gig. _That_ must
+the young man have felt too plainly. His back was now turned to us; not
+by sight could he any longer communicate with the peril; but, by the
+dreadful rattle of our harness, too truly had his ear been instructed
+that all was finished as regarded any effort of _his_. Already in
+resignation he had rested from his struggle; and perhaps in his heart he
+was whispering, "Father, which art in heaven, do Thou finish above what
+I on earth have attempted." Faster than ever mill-race we ran past
+them in our inexorable flight. Oh, raving of hurricanes that must have
+sounded in their young ears at the moment of our transit! Even in
+that moment the thunder of collision spoke aloud. Either with the
+swingle-bar, or with the haunch of our near leader, we had struck the
+off-wheel of the little gig; which stood rather obliquely, and not quite
+so far advanced as to be accurately parallel with the near-wheel. The
+blow, from the fury of our passage, resounded terrifically. I rose in
+horror, to gaze upon the ruins we might have caused. From my elevated
+station I looked down, and looked back upon the scene; which in a moment
+told its own tale, and wrote all its records on my heart for ever.
+
+Here was the map of the passion that now had finished. The horse was
+planted immovably, with his fore-feet upon the paved crest of the
+central road. He of the whole party might be supposed untouched by the
+passion of death. The little cany carriage--partly, perhaps, from the
+violent torsion of the wheels in its recent movement, partly from the
+thundering blow we had given to it--as if it sympathised with human
+horror, was all alive with tremblings and shiverings. The young man
+trembled not, nor shivered. He sat like a rock. But _his_ was the
+steadiness of agitation frozen into rest by horror. As yet he dared not
+to look round; for he knew that, if anything remained to do, by him it
+could no longer be done. And as yet he knew not for certain if their
+safety were accomplished. But the lady--
+
+But the lady--! Oh, heavens! will that spectacle ever depart from my
+dreams, as she rose and sank upon her seat, sank and rose, threw up her
+arms wildly to heaven, clutched at some visionary object in the air,
+fainting, praying, raving, despairing? Figure to yourself, reader,
+the elements of the case; suffer me to recall before your mind the
+circumstances of that unparalleled situation. From the silence and deep
+peace of this saintly summer night--from the pathetic blending of this
+sweet moonlight, dawnlight, dreamlight--from the manly tenderness of
+this flattering, whispering, murmuring love--suddenly as from the
+woods and fields--suddenly as from the chambers of the air opening in
+revelation--suddenly as from the ground yawning at her feet, leaped upon
+her, with the flashing of cataracts, Death the crowned phantom, with all
+the equipage of his terrors, and the tiger roar of his voice.
+
+The moments were numbered; the strife was finished; the vision was
+closed. In the twinkling of an eye, our flying horses had carried us to
+the termination of the umbrageous aisle; at the right angles we wheeled
+into our former direction; the turn of the road carried the scene out of
+my eyes in an instant, and swept it into my dreams for ever.
+
+
+SECTION III--DREAM-FUGUE:
+
+FOUNDED ON THE PRECEDING THEME OF SUDDEN DEATH
+
+        "Whence the sound
+  Of instruments, that made melodious chime,
+  Was heard, of harp and organ; and who moved
+  Their stops and chords was seen; his volant touch
+  Instinct through all proportions, low and high,
+  Fled and pursued transverse the resonant fugue."
+  _Par. Lost_, Bk. XI.
+
+_Tumultuosissimamente_
+
+
+Passion of sudden death! that once in youth I read and interpreted by
+the shadows of thy averted signs [Footnote: "_Averted signs_":--I read
+the course and changes of the lady's agony in the succession of her
+involuntary gestures; but it must be remembered that I read all this
+from the rear, never once catching the lady's full face, and even her
+profile imperfectly.]!--rapture of panic taking the shape (which
+amongst tombs in churches I have seen) of woman bursting her sepulchral
+bonds--of woman's Ionic form bending forward from the ruins of her
+grave with arching foot, with eyes upraised, with clasped adoring
+hands--waiting, watching, trembling, praying for the trumpet's call to
+rise from dust for ever! Ah, vision too fearful of shuddering humanity
+on the brink of almighty abysses!--vision that didst start back, that
+didst reel away, like a shrivelling scroll from before the wrath of fire
+racing on the wings of the wind! Epilepsy so brief of horror, wherefore
+is it that thou canst not die? Passing so suddenly into darkness,
+wherefore is it that still thou sheddest thy sad funeral blights upon
+the gorgeous mosaics of dreams? Fragment of music too passionate, heard
+once, and heard no more, what aileth thee, that thy deep rolling chords
+come up at intervals through all the worlds of sleep, and after forty
+years have lost no element of horror?
+
+
+I
+
+
+Lo, it is summer--almighty summer! The everlasting gates of life and
+summer are thrown open wide; and on the ocean, tranquil and verdant as
+a savannah, the unknown lady from the dreadful vision and I myself are
+floating--she upon a fairy pinnace, and I upon an English three-decker.
+Both of us are wooing gales of festal happiness within the domain of
+our common country, within that ancient watery park, within the pathless
+chase of ocean, where England takes her pleasure as a huntress through
+winter and summer, from the rising to the setting sun. Ah, what a
+wilderness of floral beauty was hidden, or was suddenly revealed, upon
+the tropic islands through which the pinnace moved! And upon her deck
+what a bevy of human flowers: young women how lovely, young men how
+noble, that were dancing together, and slowly drifting towards _us_
+amidst music and incense, amidst blossoms from forests and gorgeous
+corymbi from vintages, amidst natural carolling, and the echoes of sweet
+girlish laughter. Slowly the pinnace nears us, gaily she hails us, and
+silently she disappears beneath the shadow of our mighty bows. But then,
+as at some signal from heaven, the music, and the carols, and the sweet
+echoing of girlish laughter--all are hushed. What evil has smitten the
+pinnace, meeting or overtaking her? Did ruin to our friends couch within
+our own dreadful shadow? Was our shadow the shadow of death? I looked
+over the bow for an answer, and, behold! the pinnace was dismantled; the
+revel and the revellers were found no more; the glory of the vintage was
+dust; and the forests with their beauty were left without a witness upon
+the seas. "But where," and I turned to our crew--"where are the lovely
+women that danced beneath the awning of flowers and clustering corymbi?
+Whither have fled the noble young men that danced with _them_?" Answer
+there was none. But suddenly the man at the mast-head, whose countenance
+darkened with alarm, cried out, "Sail on the weather beam! Down she
+comes upon us: in seventy seconds she also will founder."
+
+
+II
+
+
+I looked to the weather side, and the summer had departed. The sea was
+rocking, and shaken with gathering wrath. Upon its surface sat mighty
+mists, which grouped themselves into arches and long cathedral aisles.
+Down one of these, with the fiery pace of a quarrel from a cross-bow,
+ran a frigate right athwart our course. "Are they mad?" some voice
+exclaimed from our deck. "Do they woo their ruin?" But in a moment, as
+she was close upon us, some impulse of a heady current or local vortex
+gave a wheeling bias to her course, and off she forged without a shock.
+As she ran past us, high aloft amongst the shrouds stood the lady of
+the pinnace. The deeps opened ahead in malice to receive her, towering
+surges of foam ran after her, the billows were fierce to catch her. But
+far away she was borne into desert spaces of the sea: whilst still by
+sight I followed her, as she ran before the howling gale, chased by
+angry sea-birds and by maddening billows; still I saw her, as at the
+moment when she ran past us, standing amongst the shrouds, with her
+white draperies streaming before the wind. There she stood, with hair
+dishevelled, one hand clutched amongst the tackling--rising, sinking,
+fluttering, trembling, praying; there for leagues I saw her as she
+stood, raising at intervals one hand to heaven, amidst the fiery crests
+of the pursuing waves and the raving of the storm; until at last, upon
+a sound from afar of malicious laughter and mockery, all was hidden for
+ever in driving showers; and afterwards, but when I knew not, nor how.
+
+
+III
+
+
+Sweet funeral bells from some incalculable distance, wailing over the
+dead that die before the dawn, awakened me as I slept in a boat moored
+to some familiar shore. The morning twilight even then was breaking;
+and, by the dusky revelations which it spread, I saw a girl, adorned
+with a garland of white roses about her head for some great festival,
+running along the solitary strand in extremity of haste. Her running
+was the running of panic; and often she looked back as to some dreadful
+enemy in the rear. But, when I leaped ashore, and followed on her steps
+to warn her of a peril in front, alas! from me she fled as from another
+peril, and vainly I shouted to her of quicksands that lay ahead. Faster
+and faster she ran; round a promontory of rocks she wheeled out of
+sight; in an instant I also wheeled round it, but only to see the
+treacherous sands gathering above her head. Already her person was
+buried; only the fair young head and the diadem of white roses around it
+were still visible to the pitying heavens; and, last of all, was visible
+one white marble arm. I saw by the early twilight this fair young head,
+as it was sinking down to darkness--saw this marble arm, as it rose
+above her head and her treacherous grave, tossing, faltering, rising,
+clutching, as at some false deceiving hand stretched out from the
+clouds--saw this marble arm uttering her dying hope, and then uttering
+her dying despair. The head, the diadem, the arm--these all had sunk; at
+last over these also the cruel quicksand had closed; and no memorial of
+the fair young girl remained on earth, except my own solitary tears, and
+the funeral bells from the desert seas, that, rising again more softly,
+sang a requiem over the grave of the buried child, and over her blighted
+dawn.
+
+I sat, and wept in secret the tears that men have ever given to the
+memory of those that died before the dawn, and by the treachery of
+earth, our mother. But suddenly the tears and funeral bells were hushed
+by a shout as of many nations, and by a roar as from some great king's
+artillery, advancing rapidly along the valleys, and heard afar by echoes
+from the mountains. "Hush!" I said, as I bent my ear earthwards to
+listen--"hush!--this either is the very anarchy of strife, or else"--and
+then I listened more profoundly, and whispered as I raised my head--"or
+else, oh heavens! it is _victory_ that is final, victory that swallows
+up all strife."
+
+
+IV
+
+
+Immediately, in trance, I was carried over land and sea to some distant
+kingdom, and placed upon a triumphal car, amongst companions crowned
+with laurel. The darkness of gathering midnight, brooding over all the
+land, hid from us the mighty crowds that were weaving restlessly about
+ourselves as a centre: we heard them, but saw them not. Tidings had
+arrived, within an hour, of a grandeur that measured itself against
+centuries; too full of pathos they were, too full of joy, to utter
+themselves by other language than by tears, by restless anthems, and
+_Te Deums_ reverberated from the choirs and orchestras of earth. These
+tidings we that sat upon the laurelled car had it for our privilege to
+publish amongst all nations. And already, by signs audible through the
+darkness, by snortings and tramplings, our angry horses, that knew no
+fear or fleshly weariness, upbraided us with delay. Wherefore _was_ it
+that we delayed? We waited for a secret word, that should bear witness
+to the hope of nations as now accomplished for ever. At midnight
+the secret word arrived; which word was--_Waterloo and Recovered
+Christendom!_ The dreadful word shone by its own light; before us it
+went; high above our leaders' heads it rode, and spread a golden light
+over the paths which we traversed. Every city, at the presence of the
+secret word, threw open its gates. The rivers were conscious as we
+crossed. All the forests, as we ran along their margins, shivered in
+homage to the secret word. And the darkness comprehended it.
+
+Two hours after midnight we approached a mighty Minster. Its gates,
+which rose to the clouds, were closed. But, when the dreadful word that
+rode before us reached them with its golden light, silently they moved
+back upon their hinges; and at a flying gallop our equipage entered the
+grand aisle of the cathedral. Headlong was our pace; and at every altar,
+in the little chapels and oratories to the right hand and left of our
+course, the lamps, dying or sickening, kindled anew in sympathy with the
+secret word that was flying past. Forty leagues we might have run in the
+cathedral, and as yet no strength of morning light had reached us, when
+before us we saw the aerial galleries of organ and choir. Every pinnacle
+of fretwork, every station of advantage amongst the traceries, was
+crested by white-robed choristers that sang deliverance; that wept no
+more tears, as once their fathers had wept; but at intervals that sang
+together to the generations, saying,
+
+  "Chant the deliverer's praise in every tongue,"
+
+and receiving answers from afar,
+
+  "Such as once in heaven and earth were sung."
+
+And of their chanting was no end; of our headlong pace was neither pause
+nor slackening.
+
+Thus as we ran like torrents--thus as we swept with bridal rapture over
+the Campo Santo [Footnote: "_Campo Santo_":--It is probable that most
+of my readers will be acquainted with the history of the Campo Santo (or
+cemetery) at Pisa, composed of earth brought from Jerusalem from a bed
+of sanctity as the highest prize which the noble piety of crusaders
+could ask or imagine. To readers who are unacquainted with England, or
+who (being English) are yet unacquainted with the cathedral cities of
+England, it may be right to mention that the graves within-side the
+cathedrals often form a flat pavement over which carriages and horses
+_might_ run; and perhaps a boyish remembrance of one particular
+cathedral, across which I had seen passengers walk and burdens carried,
+as about two centuries back they were through the middle of St.
+Paul's in London, may have assisted my dream.] of the cathedral
+graves--suddenly we became aware of a vast necropolis rising upon
+the far-off horizon--a city of sepulchres, built within the saintly
+cathedral for the warrior dead that rested from their feuds on earth. Of
+purple granite was the necropolis; yet, in the first minute, it lay
+like a purple stain upon the horizon, so mighty was the distance. In the
+second minute it trembled through many changes, growing into terraces
+and towers of wondrous altitude, so mighty was the pace. In the third
+minute already, with our dreadful gallop, we were entering its suburbs.
+Vast sarcophagi rose on every side, having towers and turrets that, upon
+the limits of the central aisle, strode forward with haughty intrusion,
+that ran back with mighty shadows into answering recesses. Every
+sarcophagus showed many bas-reliefs--bas-reliefs of battles and of
+battle-fields; battles from forgotten ages, battles from yesterday;
+battle-fields that, long since, nature had healed and reconciled to
+herself with the sweet oblivion of flowers; battle-fields that were yet
+angry and crimson with carnage. Where the terraces ran, there did _we_
+run; where the towers curved, there did _we_ curve. With the flight
+of swallows our horses swept round every angle. Like rivers in flood
+wheeling round headlands, like hurricanes that ride into the secrets of
+forests, faster than ever light unwove the mazes of darkness, our flying
+equipage carried earthly passions, kindled warrior instincts, amongst
+the dust that lay around us--dust oftentimes of our noble fathers that
+had slept in God from Crecy to Trafalgar. And now had we reached the
+last sarcophagus, now were we abreast of the last bas-relief, already
+had we recovered the arrow-like flight of the illimitable central aisle,
+when coming up this aisle to meet us we beheld afar off a female child,
+that rode in a carriage as frail as flowers. The mists which went before
+her hid the fawns that drew her, but could not hide the shells and
+tropic flowers with which she played--but could not hide the lovely
+smiles by which she uttered her trust in the mighty cathedral, and in
+the cherubim that looked down upon her from the mighty shafts of its
+pillars. Face to face she was meeting us; face to face she rode, as
+if danger there were none. "Oh, baby!" I exclaimed, "shalt thou be the
+ransom for Waterloo? Must we, that carry tidings of great joy to every
+people, be messengers of ruin to thee!" In horror I rose at the thought;
+but then also, in horror at the thought, rose one that was sculptured
+on a bas-relief--a Dying Trumpeter. Solemnly from the field of battle he
+rose to his feet; and, unslinging his stony trumpet, carried it, in his
+dying anguish, to his stony lips--sounding once, and yet once again;
+proclamation that, in _thy_ ears, oh baby! spoke from the battlements of
+death. Immediately deep shadows fell between us, and aboriginal silence.
+The choir had ceased to sing. The hoofs of our horses, the dreadful
+rattle of our harness, the groaning of our wheels, alarmed the graves
+no more. By horror the bas-relief had been unlocked unto life. By horror
+we, that were so full of life, we men and our horses, with their fiery
+fore-legs rising in mid air to their everlasting gallop, were frozen
+to a bas-relief. Then a third time the trumpet sounded; the seals were
+taken off all pulses; life, and the frenzy of life, tore into their
+channels again; again the choir burst forth in sunny grandeur, as from
+the muffling of storms and darkness; again the thunderings of our horses
+carried temptation into the graves. One cry burst from our lips, as the
+clouds, drawing off from the aisle, showed it empty before us.--"Whither
+has the infant fled?--is the young child caught up to God?" Lo! afar
+off, in a vast recess, rose three mighty windows to the clouds; and on a
+level with their summits, at height insuperable to man, rose an altar of
+purest alabaster. On its eastern face was trembling a crimson glory.
+A glory was it from the reddening dawn that now streamed _through_ the
+windows? Was it from the crimson robes of the martyrs painted _on_ the
+windows? Was it from the bloody bas-reliefs of earth? There, suddenly,
+within that crimson radiance, rose the apparition of a woman's head, and
+then of a woman's figure. The child it was--grown up to woman's height.
+Clinging to the horns of the altar, voiceless she stood--sinking,
+rising, raving, despairing; and behind the volume of incense that, night
+and day, streamed upwards from the altar, dimly was seen the fiery font,
+and the shadow of that dreadful being who should have baptized her with
+the baptism of death. But by her side was kneeling her better angel,
+that hid his face with wings; that wept and pleaded for _her_; that
+prayed when _she_ could _not_; that fought with Heaven by tears for
+_her_ deliverance; which also, as he raised his immortal countenance
+from his wings, I saw, by the glory in his eye, that from Heaven he had
+won at last.
+
+
+V
+
+
+Then was completed the passion of the mighty fugue. The golden tubes of
+the organ, which as yet had but muttered at intervals--gleaming amongst
+clouds and surges of incense--threw up, as from fountains unfathomable,
+columns of heart-shattering music. Choir and anti-choir were filling
+fast with unknown voices. Thou also, Dying Trumpeter, with thy love
+that was victorious, and thy anguish that was finishing, didst enter
+the tumult; trumpet and echo--farewell love, and farewell anguish--rang
+through the dreadful _sanctus_. Oh, darkness of the grave! that from the
+crimson altar and from the fiery font wert visited and searched by the
+effulgence in the angel's eye--were these indeed thy children? Pomps of
+life, that, from the burials of centuries, rose again to the voice of
+perfect joy, did ye indeed mingle with the festivals of Death? Lo! as I
+looked back for seventy leagues through the mighty cathedral, I saw the
+quick and the dead that sang together to God, together that sang to the
+generations of man. All the hosts of jubilation, like armies that ride
+in pursuit, moved with one step. Us, that, with laurelled heads, were
+passing from the cathedral, they overtook, and, as with a garment, they
+wrapped us round with thunders greater than our own. As brothers we
+moved together; to the dawn that advanced, to the stars that fled;
+rendering thanks to God in the highest--that, having hid His face
+through one generation behind thick clouds of War, once again was
+ascending, from the Campo Santo of Waterloo was ascending, in the
+visions of Peace; rendering thanks for thee, young girl! whom having
+overshadowed with His ineffable passion of death, suddenly did God
+relent, suffered thy angel to turn aside His arm, and even in thee,
+sister unknown! shown to me for a moment only to be hidden for ever,
+found an occasion to glorify His goodness. A thousand times, amongst
+the phantoms of sleep, have I seen thee entering the gates of the golden
+dawn, with the secret word riding before thee, with the armies of the
+grave behind thee,--seen thee sinking, rising, raving, despairing; a
+thousand times in the worlds of sleep have I seen thee followed by
+God's angel through storms, through desert seas, through the darkness
+of quicksands, through dreams and the dreadful revelations that are in
+dreams; only that at the last, with one sling of His victorious arm, He
+might snatch thee back from ruin, and might emblazon in thy deliverance
+the endless resurrections of His love!
+
+
+
+
+JOAN OF ARC
+
+
+[Footnote: "_Arc_":--Modern France, that should know a great
+deal better than myself, insists that the name is not D'Arc--_i.e._,
+of Arc--but _Darc_. Now it happens sometimes that, if a person whose
+position guarantees his access to the best information will content
+himself with gloomy dogmatism, striking the table with his fist, and
+saying in a terrific voice, "It _is_ so, and there's an end of it," one
+bows deferentially, and submits. But, if, unhappily for himself, won
+by this docility, he relents too amiably into reasons and arguments,
+probably one raises an insurrection against him that may never be
+crushed; for in the fields of logic one can skirmish, perhaps, as well
+as he. Had he confined himself to dogmatism, he would have intrenched
+his position in darkness, and have hidden his own vulnerable points.
+But coming down to base reasons he lets in light, and one sees where
+to plant the blows. Now, the worshipful reason of modern France for
+disturbing the old received spelling is that Jean Hordal, a descendant
+of La Pucelle's brother, spelled the name _Darc_ in 1612. But what of
+that? It is notorious that what small matter of spelling Providence had
+thought fit to disburse amongst man in the seventeenth century was all
+monopolised by printers; now, M. Hordal was _not_ a printer.]
+
+
+What is to be thought of _her_? What is to be thought of the poor
+shepherd girl from the hills and forests of Lorraine, that--like the
+Hebrew shepherd boy from the hills and forests of Judea--rose suddenly
+out of the quiet, out of the safety, out of the religious inspiration,
+rooted in deep pastoral solitudes, to a station in the van of armies,
+and to the more perilous station at the right hand of kings? The Hebrew
+boy inaugurated his patriotic mission by an _act_, by a victorious
+_act_, such as no man could deny. But so did the girl of Lorraine, if
+we read her story as it was read by those who saw her nearest. Adverse
+armies bore witness to the boy as no pretender; but so they did to the
+gentle girl. Judged by the voices of all who saw them _from a station of
+good will_, both were found true and loyal to any promises involved in
+their first acts. Enemies it was that made the difference between
+their subsequent fortunes. The boy rose to a splendour and a noonday
+prosperity, both personal and public, that rang through the records
+of his people, and became a byword among his posterity for a thousand
+years, until the sceptre was departing from Judah. The poor, forsaken
+girl, on the contrary, drank not herself from that cup of rest which she
+had secured for France. She never sang together with the songs that rose
+in her native Domremy as echoes to the departing steps of invaders.
+She mingled not in the festal dances at Vaucouleurs which celebrated in
+rapture the redemption of France. No! for her voice was then silent; no!
+for her feet were dust. Pure, innocent, noble-hearted girl! whom, from
+earliest youth, ever I believed in as full of truth and self-sacrifice,
+this was amongst the strongest pledges for _thy_ truth, that never
+once--no, not for a moment of weakness--didst thou revel in the vision
+of coronets and honour from man. Coronets for thee! Oh, no! Honours,
+if they come when all is over, are for those that share thy blood.
+[Footnote: "_Those that share thy blood_":--A collateral relative of
+Joanna's was subsequently ennobled by the title of _Du Lys_.] Daughter
+of Domremy, when the gratitude of thy king shall awaken, thou wilt be
+sleeping the sleep of the dead. Call her, King of France, but she will
+not hear thee. Cite her by the apparitors to come and receive a robe
+of honour, but she will be found _en contumace_. When the thunders of
+universal France, as even yet may happen, shall proclaim the grandeur of
+the poor shepherd girl that gave up all for her country, thy ear, young
+shepherd girl, will have been deaf for five centuries. To suffer and to
+do, that was thy portion in this life; that was thy destiny; and not for
+a moment was it hidden from thyself. Life, thou saidst, is short;
+and the sleep which is in the grave is long; let me use that life, so
+transitory, for the glory of those heavenly dreams destined to comfort
+the sleep which is so long! This pure creature--pure from every
+suspicion of even a visionary self-interest, even as she was pure
+in senses more obvious--never once did this holy child, as regarded
+herself, relax from her belief in the darkness that was travelling to
+meet her. She might not prefigure the very manner of her death; she saw
+not in vision, perhaps, the aerial altitude of the fiery scaffold,
+the spectators without end, on every road, pouring into Rouen as to a
+coronation, the surging smoke, the volleying flames, the hostile faces
+all around, the pitying eye that lurked but here and there, until nature
+and imperishable truth broke loose from artificial restraints--these
+might not be apparent through the mists of the hurrying future. But the
+voice that called her to death, _that_ she heard for ever.
+
+Great was the throne of France even in those days, and great was He that
+sat upon it; but well Joanna knew that not the throne, nor he that sat
+upon it, was for _her_; but, on the contrary, that she was for _them_;
+not she by them, but they by her, should rise from the dust. Gorgeous
+were the lilies of France, and for centuries had the privilege to spread
+their beauty over land and sea, until, in another century, the wrath
+of God and man combined to wither them; but well Joanna knew, early at
+Domremy she had read that bitter truth, that the lilies of France would
+decorate no garland for _her_. Flower nor bud, bell nor blossom, would
+ever bloom for _her_!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But stay. What reason is there for taking up this subject of Joanna
+precisely in the spring of 1847? Might it not have been left till the
+spring of 1947, or, perhaps, left till called for? Yes, but it _is_
+called for, and clamorously. You are aware, reader, that amongst the
+many original thinkers whom modern France has produced, one of the
+reputed leaders is M. Michelet. All these writers are of a revolutionary
+cast; not in a political sense merely, but in all senses; mad,
+oftentimes, as March hares; crazy with the laughing gas of recovered
+liberty; drunk with the wine cup of their mighty Revolution, snorting,
+whinnying, throwing up their heels, like wild horses in the boundless
+pampas, and running races of defiance with snipes, or with the winds, or
+with their own shadows, if they can find nothing else to challenge. Some
+time or other, I, that have leisure to read, may introduce _you_, that
+have not, to two or three dozen of these writers; of whom I can assure
+you beforehand that they are often profound, and at intervals are even
+as impassioned as if they were come of our best English blood. But now,
+confining our attention to M. Michelet, we in England--who know him
+best by his worst book, the book against priests, etc.--know him
+disadvantageously. That book is a rhapsody of incoherence. But his
+"History of France" is quite another thing. A man, in whatsoever craft
+he sails, cannot stretch away out of sight when he is linked to the
+windings of the shore by towing-ropes of History. Facts, and the
+consequences of facts, draw the writer back to the falconer's lure
+from the giddiest heights of speculation. Here, therefore--in his
+"France"--if not always free from flightiness, if now and then off like
+a rocket for an airy wheel in the clouds, M. Michelet, with natural
+politeness, never forgets that he has left a large audience waiting
+for him on earth, and gazing upward in anxiety for his return; return,
+therefore, he does. But History, though clear of certain temptations in
+one direction, has separate dangers of its own. It is impossible so to
+write a history of France, or of England--works becoming every hour
+more indispensable to the inevitably political man of this day--without
+perilous openings for error. If I, for instance, on the part of England,
+should happen to turn my labours into that channel, and (on the model of
+Lord Percy going to Chevy Chase)
+
+  "A vow to God should make
+  My pleasure in the Michelet woods
+  Three summer days to take,"
+
+probably, from simple delirium, I might hunt M. Michelet into _delirium
+tremens_. Two strong angels stand by the side of History, whether French
+history or English, as heraldic supporters: the angel of research on
+the left hand, that must read millions of dusty parchments, and of pages
+blotted with lies; the angel of meditation on the right hand, that must
+cleanse these lying records with fire, even as of old the draperies of
+_asbestos_ were cleansed, and must quicken them into regenerated life.
+Willingly I acknowledge that no man will ever avoid innumerable errors
+of detail; with so vast a compass of ground to traverse, this is
+impossible; but such errors (though I have a bushel on hand, at M.
+Michelet's service) are not the game I chase; it is the bitter and
+unfair spirit in which M. Michelet writes against England. Even _that_,
+after all, is but my secondary object; the real one is Joanna, the
+Pucelle d'Orleans herself.
+
+I am not going to write the history of La Pucelle: to do this, or even
+circumstantially to report the history of her persecution and bitter
+death, of her struggle with false witnesses and with ensnaring judges,
+it would be necessary to have before us _all_ the documents, and
+therefore the collection only now forthcoming in Paris. [Footnote:
+"_Only now forthcoming_":--In 1847 _began_ the publication (from
+official records) of Joanna's trial. It was interrupted, I fear, by the
+convulsions of 1848; and whether even yet finished I do not know.] But
+_my_ purpose is narrower. There have been great thinkers, disdaining the
+careless judgments of contemporaries, who have thrown themselves boldly
+on the judgment of a far posterity, that should have had time to review,
+to ponder, to compare. There have been great actors on the stage of
+tragic humanity that might, with the same depth of confidence, have
+appealed from the levity of compatriot friends--too heartless for the
+sublime interest of their story, and too impatient for the labour of
+sifting its perplexities--to the magnanimity and justice of enemies. To
+this class belongs the Maid of Arc. The ancient Romans were too faithful
+to the ideal of grandeur in themselves not to relent, after a generation
+or two, before the grandeur of Hannibal. Mithridates, a more doubtful
+person, yet, merely for the magic perseverance of his indomitable
+malice, won from the same Romans the only real honour that ever he
+received on earth. And we English have ever shown the same homage to
+stubborn enmity. To work unflinchingly for the ruin of England; to say
+through life, by word and by deed, _Delenda est Anglia Victrix_!--that
+one purpose of malice, faithfully pursued, has quartered some people
+upon our national funds of homage as by a perpetual annuity. Better
+than an inheritance of service rendered to England herself has sometimes
+proved the most insane hatred to England. Hyder Ali, even his son
+Tippoo, though so far inferior, and Napoleon, have all benefited by this
+disposition among ourselves to exaggerate the merit of diabolic enmity.
+Not one of these men was ever capable, in a solitary instance, of
+praising an enemy (what do you say to _that_, reader?); and yet in
+_their_ behalf, we consent to forget, not their crimes only, but (which
+is worse) their hideous bigotry and anti-magnanimous egotism--for
+nationality it was not. Suffren, and some half dozen of other French
+nautical heroes, because rightly they did us all the mischief they could
+(which was really great), are names justly reverenced in England. On the
+same principle, La Pucelle d'Orleans, the victorious enemy of England,
+has been destined to receive her deepest commemoration from the
+magnanimous justice of Englishmen.
+
+Joanna, as we in England should call her, but according to her
+own statement, Jeanne (or, as M. Michelet asserts, Jean [Footnote:
+"_Jean_":--M. Michelet asserts that there was a mystical meaning at that
+era in calling a child _Jean_; it implied a secret commendation of a
+child, if not a dedication, to St. John the evangelist, the beloved
+disciple, the apostle of love and mysterious visions. But, really, as
+the name was so exceedingly common, few people will detect a mystery in
+calling a _boy_ by the name of Jack, though it _does_ seem mysterious
+to call a girl Jack. It may be less so in France, where a beautiful
+practice has always prevailed of giving a boy his mother's
+name--preceded and strengthened by a male name, as _Charles Anne_,
+_Victor Victoire_. In cases where a mother's memory has been unusually
+dear to a son, this vocal memento of her, locked into the circle of
+his own name, gives to it the tenderness of a testamentary relic, or a
+funeral ring. I presume, therefore, that La Pucelle must have borne the
+baptismal name of Jeanne Jean; the latter with no reference, perhaps,
+to so sublime a person as St. John, but simply to some relative.]) D'Arc
+was born at Domremy, a village on the marches of Lorraine and Champagne,
+and dependent upon the town of Vaucouleurs. I have called her a
+Lorrainer, not simply because the word is prettier, but because
+Champagne too odiously reminds us English of what are for _us_ imaginary
+wines--which, undoubtedly, La Pucelle tasted as rarely as we English: we
+English, because the champagne of London is chiefly grown in Devonshire;
+La Pucelle, because the champagne of Champagne never, by any chance,
+flowed into the fountain of Domremy, from which only she drank. M.
+Michelet will have her to be a _Champenoise_, and for no better
+reason than that she "took after her father," who happened to be a
+_Champenois_.
+
+These disputes, however, turn on refinements too nice. Domremy stood
+upon the frontiers, and, like other frontiers, produced a _mixed_ race,
+representing the _cis_ and the _trans_. A river (it is true) formed the
+boundary line at this point--the river Meuse; and _that_, in old days,
+might have divided the populations; but in these days it did not; there
+were bridges, there were ferries, and weddings crossed from the right
+bank to the left. Here lay two great roads, not so much for travellers
+that were few, as for armies that were too many by half. These two
+roads, one of which was the great highroad between France and Germany,
+_decussated_ at this very point; which is a learned way of saying that
+they formed a St. Andrew's Cross, or letter X. I hope the compositor
+will choose a good large X; in which case the point of intersection, the
+_locus_ of conflux and intersection for these four diverging arms,
+will finish the reader's geographical education, by showing him to a
+hair's-breadth where it was that Domremy stood. These roads, so grandly
+situated, as great trunk arteries between two mighty realms,[Footnote:
+And reminding one of that inscription, so justly admired by Paul
+Richter, which a Russian Czarina placed on a guide-post near Moscow:
+_This is the road that leads to Constantinople._] and haunted for ever
+by wars or rumours of wars, decussated (for anything I know to the
+contrary) absolutely under Joanna's bedroom window; one rolling away
+to the right, past M. D'Arc's old barn, and the other unaccountably
+preferring to sweep round that odious man's pig-sty to the left.
+
+On whichever side of the border chance had thrown Joanna, the same love
+to France would have been nurtured. For it is a strange fact, noticed
+by M. Michelet and others, that the Dukes of Bar and Lorraine had for
+generations pursued the policy of eternal warfare with France on their
+own account, yet also of eternal amity and league with France in case
+anybody else presumed to attack her. Let peace settle upon France, and
+before long you might rely upon seeing the little vixen Lorraine flying
+at the throat of France. Let France be assailed by a formidable enemy,
+and instantly you saw a Duke of Lorraine insisting on having his own
+throat cut in support of France; which favour accordingly was cheerfully
+granted to him in three great successive battles: twice by the English,
+viz., at Crecy and Agincourt, once by the Sultan at Nicopolis.
+
+This sympathy with France during great eclipses, in those that during
+ordinary seasons were always teasing her with brawls and guerilla
+inroads, strengthened the natural piety to France of those that were
+confessedly the children of her own house. The outposts of France, as
+one may call the great frontier provinces, were of all localities the
+most devoted to the Fleurs de Lys. To witness, at any great crisis, the
+generous devotion to these lilies of the little fiery cousin that in
+gentler weather was for ever tilting at the breast of France, could not
+but fan the zeal of France's legitimate daughters; while to occupy
+a post of honour on the frontiers against an old hereditary enemy of
+France would naturally stimulate this zeal by a sentiment of martial
+pride, by a sense of danger always threatening, and of hatred always
+smouldering. That great four-headed road was a perpetual memento to
+patriotic ardour. To say "This way lies the road to Paris, and that
+other way to Aix-la-Chapelle; this to Prague, that to Vienna," nourished
+the warfare of the heart by daily ministrations of sense. The eye that
+watched for the gleams of lance or helmet from the hostile frontier, the
+ear that listened for the groaning of wheels, made the highroad itself,
+with its relations to centres so remote, into a manual of patriotic
+duty.
+
+The situation, therefore, _locally_, of Joanna was full of profound
+suggestions to a heart that listened for the stealthy steps of change
+and fear that too surely were in motion. But, if the place were grand,
+the time, the burden of the time, was far more so. The air overhead in
+its upper chambers was _hurtling_ with the obscure sound; was dark with
+sullen fermenting of storms that had been gathering for a hundred and
+thirty years. The battle of Agincourt in Joanna's childhood had reopened
+the wounds of France. Crecy and Poictiers, those withering overthrows
+for the chivalry of France, had, before Agincourt occurred, been
+tranquilised by more than half a century; but this resurrection of their
+trumpet wails made the whole series of battles and endless skirmishes
+take their stations as parts in one drama. The graves that had closed
+sixty years ago seemed to fly open in sympathy with a sorrow that echoed
+their own. The monarchy of France laboured in extremity, rocked and
+reeled like a ship fighting with the darkness of monsoons. The madness
+of the poor king (Charles VI), falling in at such a crisis, like the
+case of women labouring in child-birth during the storming of a city,
+trebled the awfulness of the time. Even the wild story of the incident
+which had immediately occasioned the explosion of this madness--the case
+of a man unknown, gloomy, and perhaps maniacal himself, coming out of a
+forest at noonday, laying his hand upon the bridle of the king's horse,
+checking him for a moment to say, "Oh, king, thou art betrayed," and
+then vanishing, no man knew whither, as he had appeared for no man knew
+what--fell in with the universal prostration of mind that laid France on
+her knees, as before the slow unweaving of some ancient prophetic
+doom. The famines, the extraordinary diseases, the insurrections of the
+peasantry up and down Europe--these were chords struck from the same
+mysterious harp; but these were transitory chords. There had been others
+of deeper and more ominous sound. The termination of the Crusades, the
+destruction of the Templars, the Papal interdicts, the tragedies caused
+or suffered by the house of Anjou, and by the Emperor--these were full
+of a more permanent significance. But, since then, the colossal figure
+of feudalism was seen standing, as it were on tiptoe, at Crecy, for
+flight from earth: that was a revolution unparalleled; yet _that_ was a
+trifle by comparison with the more fearful revolutions that were
+mining below the Church. By her own internal schisms, by the abominable
+spectacle of a double Pope--so that no man, except through political
+bias, could even guess which was Heaven's vicegerent, and which the
+creature of Hell--the Church was rehearsing, as in still earlier forms
+she had already rehearsed, those vast rents in her foundations which no
+man should ever heal.
+
+These were the loftiest peaks of the cloudland in the skies that to
+the scientific gazer first caught the colors of the _new_ morning in
+advance. But the whole vast range alike of sweeping glooms overhead
+dwelt upon all meditative minds, even upon those that could not
+distinguish the tendencies nor decipher the forms. It was, therefore,
+not her own age alone, as affected by its immediate calamities, that lay
+with such weight upon Joanna's mind, but her own age as one section in
+a vast mysterious drama, unweaving through a century back, and drawing
+nearer continually to some dreadful crisis. Cataracts and rapids were
+heard roaring ahead; and signs were seen far back, by help of old men's
+memories, which answered secretly to signs now coming forward on the
+eye, even as locks answer to keys. It was not wonderful that in such a
+haunted solitude, with such a haunted heart, Joanna should see angelic
+visions, and hear angelic voices. These voices whispered to her for ever
+the duty, self-imposed, of delivering France. Five years she listened
+to these monitory voices with internal struggles. At length she could
+resist no longer. Doubt gave way; and she left her home for ever in
+order to present herself at the dauphin's court. The education of this
+poor girl was mean according to the present standard: was ineffably
+grand, according to a purer philosophic standard: and only not good for
+our age because for us it would be unattainable. She read nothing, for
+she could not read; but she had heard others read parts of the Roman
+martyrology. She wept in sympathy with the sad "Misereres" of the Romish
+Church; she rose to heaven with the glad triumphant "Te Deums" of Rome;
+she drew her comfort and her vital strength from the rites of the same
+Church. But, next after these spiritual advantages, she owed most to the
+advantages of her situation. The fountain of Domremy was on the brink
+of a boundless forest; and it was haunted to that degree by fairies that
+the parish priest (_cure_) was obliged to read mass there once a year,
+in order to keep them in any decent bounds. Fairies are important, even
+in a statistical view: certain weeds mark poverty in the soil; fairies
+mark its solitude. As surely as the wolf retires before cities does the
+fairy sequester herself from the haunts of the licensed victualer. A
+village is too much for her nervous delicacy; at most, she can tolerate
+a distant view of a hamlet. We may judge, therefore, by the uneasiness
+and extra trouble which they gave to the parson, in what strength the
+fairies mustered at Domremy, and, by a satisfactory consequence, how
+thinly sown with men and women must have been that region even in its
+inhabited spots. But the forests of Domremy--those were the glories of
+the land: for in them abode mysterious powers and ancient secrets
+that towered into tragic strength. "Abbeys there were, and abbey
+windows"--"like Moorish temples of the Hindoos"--that exercised even
+princely power both in Lorraine and in the German Diets. These had their
+sweet bells that pierced the forests for many a league at matins or
+vespers, and each its own dreamy legend. Few enough, and scattered
+enough, were these abbeys, so as in no degree to disturb the deep
+solitude of the region; yet many enough to spread a network or awning
+of Christian sanctity over what else might have seemed a heathen
+wilderness. This sort of religious talisman being secured, a man the
+most afraid of ghosts (like myself, suppose, or the reader) becomes
+armed into courage to wander for days in their sylvan recesses. The
+mountains of the Vosges, on the eastern frontier of France, have never
+attracted much notice from Europe, except in 1813-14 for a few brief
+months, when they fell within Napoleon's line of defence against the
+Allies. But they are interesting for this among other features, that
+they do not, like some loftier ranges, repel woods; the forests and the
+hills are on sociable terms. "Live and let live" is their motto.
+For this reason, in part, these tracts in Lorraine were a favourite
+hunting-ground with the Carlovingian princes. About six hundred years
+before Joanna's childhood, Charlemagne was known to have hunted there.
+That, of itself, was a grand incident in the traditions of a forest or a
+chase. In these vast forests, also, were to be found (if anywhere to
+be found) those mysterious fawns that tempted solitary hunters into
+visionary and perilous pursuits. Here was seen (if anywhere seen) that
+ancient stag who was already nine hundred years old, but possibly a
+hundred or two more, when met by Charlemagne; and the thing was put
+beyond doubt by the inscription upon his golden collar. I believe
+Charlemagne knighted the stag; and, if ever he is met again by a king,
+he ought to be made an earl, or, being upon the marches of France, a
+marquis. Observe, I don't absolutely vouch for all these things: my own
+opinion varies. On a fine breezy forenoon I am audaciously sceptical;
+but as twilight sets in my credulity grows steadily, till it becomes
+equal to anything that could be desired. And I have heard candid
+sportsmen declare that, outside of these very forests, they laughed
+loudly at all the dim tales connected with their haunted solitudes, but,
+on reaching a spot notoriously eighteen miles deep within them, they
+agreed with Sir Roger de Coverley that a good deal might be said on both
+sides.
+
+Such traditions, or any others that (like the stag) connect distant
+generations with each other, are, for that cause, sublime; and the sense
+of the shadowy, connected with such appearances that reveal themselves
+or not according to circumstances, leaves a colouring of sanctity over
+ancient forests, even in those minds that utterly reject the legend as a
+fact.
+
+But, apart from all distinct stories of that order, in any solitary
+frontier between two great empires--as here, for instance, or in the
+desert between Syria and the Euphrates--there is an inevitable tendency,
+in minds of any deep sensibility, to people the solitudes with phantom
+images of powers that were of old so vast. Joanna, therefore, in her
+quiet occupation of a shepherdess, would be led continually to brood
+over the political condition of her country by the traditions of the
+past no less than by the mementoes of the local present.
+
+M. Michelet, indeed, says that La Pucelle was not a shepherdess. I beg
+his pardon; she was. What he rests upon I guess pretty well: it is the
+evidence of a woman called Haumette, the most confidential friend of
+Joanna. Now, she is a good witness, and a good girl, and I like her; for
+she makes a natural and affectionate report of Joanna's ordinary life.
+But still, however good she may be as a witness, Joanna is better; and
+she, when speaking to the dauphin, calls herself in the Latin report
+_Bergereta_. Even Haumette confesses that Joanna tended sheep in her
+girlhood. And I believe that, if Miss Haumette were taking coffee along
+with me this very evening (February 12, 1847)--in which there would be
+no subject for scandal or for maiden blushes, because I am an intense
+philosopher, and Miss H. would be hard upon 450 years old--she would
+admit the following comment upon her evidence to be right. A
+Frenchman, about forty years ago--M. Simond, in his "Travels"--mentions
+accidentally the following hideous scene as one steadily observed and
+watched by himself in chivalrous France not very long before the French
+Revolution: A peasant was plowing; and the team that drew his plow was
+a donkey and a woman. Both were regularly harnessed; both pulled alike.
+This is bad enough; but the Frenchman adds that, in distributing his
+lashes, the peasant was obviously desirous of being impartial; or, if
+either of the yokefellows had a right to complain, certainly it was not
+the donkey. Now, in any country where such degradation of females could
+be tolerated by the state of manners, a woman of delicacy would shrink
+from acknowledging, either for herself or her friend, that she had ever
+been addicted to any mode of labour not strictly domestic; because, if
+once owning herself a praedial servant, she would be sensible that this
+confession extended by probability in the hearer's thoughts to the
+having incurred indignities of this horrible kind. Haumette clearly
+thinks it more dignified for Joanna to have been darning the stockings
+of her horny-hoofed father, M. D'Arc, than keeping sheep, lest she might
+then be suspected of having ever done something worse. But, luckily,
+there was no danger of _that_: Joanna never was in service; and my
+opinion is that her father should have mended his own stockings, since
+probably he was the party to make the holes in them, as many a better
+man than D'Arc does--meaning by _that_ not myself, because, though
+probably a better man than D'Arc, I protest against doing anything of
+the kind. If I lived even with Friday in Juan Fernandez, either Friday
+must do all the darning, or else it must go undone. The better men that
+I meant were the sailors in the British navy, every man of whom mends
+his own stockings. Who else is to do it? Do you suppose, reader, that
+the junior lords of the admiralty are under articles to darn for the
+navy?
+
+The reason, meantime, for my systematic hatred of D'Arc is this: There
+was a story current in France before the Revolution, framed to ridicule
+the pauper aristocracy, who happened to have long pedigrees and short
+rent rolls: viz., that a head of such a house, dating from the Crusades,
+was overheard saying to his son, a Chevalier of St. Louis, "_Chevalier,
+as-tu donne au cochon a manger_?" Now, it is clearly made out by the
+surviving evidence that D'Arc would much have preferred continuing to
+say, "_Ma fille, as-tu donne au cochon a manger_?" to saying, "_Pucelle
+d'Orleans, as-tu sauve les fleurs-de-lys_?" There is an old English copy
+of verses which argues thus:
+
+  "If the man that turnips cries
+  Cry not when his father dies,
+  Then 'tis plain the man had rather
+  Have a turnip than his father."
+
+I cannot say that the logic of these verses was ever _entirely_ to my
+satisfaction. I do not see my way through it as clearly as could be
+wished. But I see my way most clearly through D'Arc; and the result
+is--that he would greatly have preferred not merely a turnip to his
+father, but the saving a pound or so of bacon to saving the Oriflamme of
+France.
+
+It is probable (as M. Michelet suggests) that the title of Virgin or
+Pucelle had in itself, and apart from the miraculous stories about
+her, a secret power over the rude soldiery and partisan chiefs of that
+period; for in such a person they saw a representative manifestation of
+the Virgin Mary, who, in a course of centuries, had grown steadily upon
+the popular heart.
+
+As to Joanna's supernatural detection of the dauphin (Charles VII) among
+three hundred lords and knights, I am surprised at the credulity which
+could ever lend itself to that theatrical juggle. Who admires more than
+myself the sublime enthusiasm, the rapturous faith in herself, of this
+pure creature? But I am far from admiring stage artifices which not La
+Pucelle, but the court, must have arranged; nor can surrender myself
+to the conjurer's legerdemain, such as may be seen every day for a
+shilling. Southey's "Joan of Arc" was published in 1796. Twenty years
+after, talking with Southey, I was surprised to find him still owning a
+secret bias in favor of Joan, founded on her detection of the dauphin.
+The story, for the benefit of the reader new to the case, was this: La
+Pucelle was first made known to the dauphin, and presented to his
+court, at Chinon; and here came her first trial. By way of testing
+her supernatural pretensions, she was to find out the royal personage
+amongst the whole ark of clean and unclean creatures. Failing in this
+_coup d'essai_, she would not simply disappoint many a beating heart in
+the glittering crowd that on different motives yearned for her success,
+but she would ruin herself, and, as the oracle within had told her,
+would, by ruining herself, ruin France. Our own Sovereign Lady Victoria
+rehearses annually a trial not so severe in degree, but the same in
+kind. She "pricks" for sheriffs. Joanna pricked for a king. But observe
+the difference: our own Lady pricks for two men out of three; Joanna
+for one man out of three hundred. Happy Lady of the Islands and the
+Orient!--she _can_ go astray in her choice only by one-half: to the
+extent of one-half she _must_ have the satisfaction of being right.
+And yet, even with these tight limits to the misery of a boundless
+discretion, permit me, Liege Lady, with all loyalty, to submit that now
+and then you prick with your pin the wrong man. But the poor child from
+Domremy, shrinking under the gaze of a dazzling court--not _because_
+dazzling (for in visions she had seen those that were more so), but
+because some of them wore a scoffing smile on their features--how should
+_she_ throw her line into so deep a river to angle for a king, where
+many a gay creature was sporting that masqueraded as kings in dress!
+Nay, even more than any true king would have done: for, in Southey's
+version of the story, the dauphin says, by way of trying the virgin's
+magnetic sympathy with royalty,
+
+        "On the throne,
+  I the while mingling with the menial throng,
+  Some courtier shall be seated."
+
+This usurper is even crowned: "the jeweled crown shines on a menial's
+head." But, really, that is "_un peu fort_"; and the mob of spectators
+might raise a scruple whether our friend the jackdaw upon the throne,
+and the dauphin himself, were not grazing the shins of treason. For
+the dauphin could not lend more than belonged to him. According to the
+popular notion, he had no crown for himself; consequently none to lend,
+on any pretence whatever, until the consecrated Maid should take him to
+Rheims. This was the _popular_ notion in France. But certainly it was
+the dauphin's interest to support the popular notion, as he meant to use
+the services of Joanna. For if he were king already, what was it that
+she could do for him beyond Orleans? That is to say, what more than a
+merely _military_ service could she render him? And, above all, if he
+were king without a coronation, and without the oil from the sacred
+ampulla, what advantage was yet open to him by celerity above his
+competitor, the English boy? Now was to be a race for a coronation: he
+that should win _that_ race carried the superstition of France along
+with him: he that should first be drawn from the ovens of Rheims was
+under that superstition baked into a king.
+
+La Pucelle, before she could be allowed to practise as a warrior, was
+put through her manual and platoon exercise, as a pupil in divinity, at
+the bar of six eminent men in wigs. According to Southey (v. 393, bk.
+iii., in the original edition of his "Joan of Arc,") she "appalled the
+doctors." It's not easy to do _that_: but they had some reason to
+feel bothered, as that surgeon would assuredly feel bothered who, upon
+proceeding to dissect a subject, should find the subject retaliating as
+a dissector upon himself, especially if Joanna ever made the speech to
+them which occupies v. 354-391, bk. iii. It is a double impossibility:
+1st, because a piracy from Tindal's "Christianity as old as the
+Creation"--a piracy _a parte ante_, and by three centuries; 2d, it is
+quite contrary to the evidence on Joanna's trial. Southey's "Joan" of
+A.D. 1796 (Cottle, Bristol) tells the doctors, among other secrets,
+that she never in her life attended--1st, Mass; nor 2d, the Sacramental
+Table; nor 3d, Confession. In the meantime, all this deistical
+confession of Joanna's, besides being suicidal for the interest of her
+cause, is opposed to the depositions upon _both_ trials. The very best
+witness called from first to last deposes that Joanna attended these
+rites of her Church even too often; was taxed with doing so; and, by
+blushing, owned the charge as a fact, though certainly not as a fault.
+Joanna was a girl of natural piety, that saw God in forests and hills
+and fountains, but did not the less seek him in chapels and consecrated
+oratories.
+
+This peasant girl was self-educated through her own natural
+meditativeness. If the reader turns to that divine passage in "Paradise
+Regained" which Milton has put into the mouth of our Saviour when first
+entering the wilderness, and musing upon the tendency of those great
+impulses growing within himself-----
+
+  "Oh, what a multitude of thoughts at once
+  Awakened in me swarm, while I consider
+  What from within I feel myself, and hear
+  What from without comes often to my ears,
+  Ill sorting with my present state compared!
+  When I was yet a child, no childish play
+  To me was pleasing; all my mind was set
+  Serious to learn and know, and thence to do,
+  What might be public good; myself I thought
+  Born to that end----"
+
+he will have some notion of the vast reveries which brooded over the
+heart of Joanna in early girlhood, when the wings were budding that
+should carry her from Orleans to Rheims; when the golden chariot was
+dimly revealing itself that should carry her from the kingdom of _France
+Delivered_ to the Eternal Kingdom.
+
+It is not requisite for the honour of Joanna, nor is there in this place
+room, to pursue her brief career of _action._ That, though wonderful,
+forms the earthly part of her story; the spiritual part is the saintly
+passion of her imprisonment, trial, and execution. It is unfortunate,
+therefore, for Southey's "Joan of Arc" (which, however, should always
+be regarded as a _juvenile_ effort), that precisely when her real glory
+begins the poem ends. But this limitation of the interest grew, no
+doubt, from the constraint inseparably attached to the law of epic
+unity. Joanna's history bisects into two opposite hemispheres, and
+both could not have been presented to the eye in one poem, unless by
+sacrificing all unity of theme, or else by involving the earlier half,
+as a narrative episode, in the latter; which, however, might have been
+done, for it might have been communicated to a fellow-prisoner, or
+a confessor, by Joanna herself. It is sufficient, as concerns _this_
+section of Joanna's life, to say that she fulfilled, to the height of
+her promises, the restoration of the prostrate throne. France had become
+a province of England, and for the ruin of both, if such a yoke could be
+maintained. Dreadful pecuniary exhaustion caused the English energy to
+droop; and that critical opening La Pucelle used with a corresponding
+felicity of audacity and suddenness (that were in themselves portentous)
+for introducing the wedge of French native resources, for rekindling the
+national pride, and for planting the dauphin once more upon his feet.
+When Joanna appeared, he had been on the point of giving up the struggle
+with the English, distressed as they were, and of flying to the south of
+France. She taught him to blush for such abject counsels. She liberated
+Orleans, that great city, so decisive by its fate for the issue of the
+war, and then beleaguered by the English with an elaborate application
+of engineering skill unprecedented in Europe. Entering the city after
+sunset on the 29th of April, she sang mass on Sunday, May 8th, for the
+entire disappearance of the besieging force. On the 29th of June she
+fought and gained over the English the decisive battle of Patay; on the
+9th of July she took Troyes by a _coup-de-main_ from a mixed garrison
+of English and Burgundians; on the 15th of that month she carried the
+dauphin into Rheims; on Sunday the 17th she crowned him; and there she
+rested from her labour of triumph. All that was to be _done_ she had now
+accomplished; what remained was--to _suffer_.
+
+All this forward movement was her own; excepting one man, the whole
+council was against her. Her enemies were all that drew power from
+earth. Her supporters were her own strong enthusiasm, and the headlong
+contagion by which she carried this sublime frenzy into the hearts of
+women, of soldiers, and of all who lived by labour. Henceforward she
+was thwarted; and the worst error that she committed was to lend the
+sanction of her presence to counsels which she had ceased to approve.
+But she had now accomplished the capital objects which her own visions
+had dictated. These involved all the rest. Errors were now less
+important; and doubtless it had now become more difficult for herself to
+pronounce authentically what _were_ errors. The noble girl had achieved,
+as by a rapture of motion, the capital end of clearing out a free space
+around her sovereign, giving him the power to move his arms with effect,
+and, secondly, the inappreciable end of winning for that sovereign
+what seemed to all France the heavenly ratification of his rights, by
+crowning him with the ancient solemnities. She had made it impossible
+for the English now to step before her. They were caught in an
+irretrievable blunder, owing partly to discord among the uncles of Henry
+VI, partly to a want of funds, but partly to the very impossibility
+which they believed to press with tenfold force upon any French attempt
+to forestall theirs. They laughed at such a thought; and, while they
+laughed, _she_ did it. Henceforth the single redress for the English
+of this capital oversight, but which never _could_ have redressed it
+effectually, was to vitiate and taint the coronation of Charles VII as
+the work of a witch. That policy, and not malice (as M. Michelet is
+so happy to believe), was the moving principle in the subsequent
+prosecution of Joanna. Unless they unhinged the force of the first
+coronation in the popular mind by associating it with power given from
+hell, they felt that the sceptre of the invader was broken.
+
+But she, the child that, at nineteen, had wrought wonders so great for
+France, was she not elated? Did she not lose, as men so often _have_
+lost, all sobriety of mind when standing upon the pinnacle of success so
+giddy? Let her enemies declare. During the progress of her movement, and
+in the centre of ferocious struggles, she had manifested the temper
+of her feelings by the pity which she had everywhere expressed for
+the suffering enemy. She forwarded to the English leaders a touching
+invitation to unite with the French, as brothers, in a common crusade
+against infidels--thus opening the road for a soldierly retreat. She
+interposed to protect the captive or the wounded; she mourned over the
+excesses of her countrymen; she threw herself off her horse to kneel by
+the dying English soldier, and to comfort him with such ministrations,
+physical or spiritual, as his situation allowed. "Nolebat," says the
+evidence, "uti ense suo, aut quemquam interficere." She sheltered
+the English that invoked her aid in her own quarters. She wept as she
+beheld, stretched on the field of battle, so many brave enemies that had
+died without confession. And, as regarded herself, her elation expressed
+itself thus: on the day when she had finished her work, she wept; for
+she knew that, when her _triumphal_ task was done, her end must be
+approaching. Her aspirations pointed only to a place which seemed to her
+more than usually full of natural piety, as one in which it would give
+her pleasure to die. And she uttered, between smiles and tears, as
+a wish that inexpressibly fascinated her heart, and yet was half
+fantastic, a broken prayer that God would return her to the solitudes
+from which he had drawn her, and suffer her to become a shepherdess once
+more. It was a natural prayer, because nature has laid a necessity upon
+every human heart to seek for rest and to shrink from torment. Yet,
+again, it was a half-fantastic prayer, because, from childhood upward,
+visions that she had no power to mistrust, and the voices which sounded
+in her ear for ever, had long since persuaded her mind that for _her_ no
+such prayer could be granted. Too well she felt that her mission must be
+worked out to the end, and that the end was now at hand. All went wrong
+from this time. She herself had created the _funds_ out of which the
+French restoration should grow; but she was not suffered to witness
+their development or their prosperous application. More than one
+military plan was entered upon which she did not approve. But she still
+continued to expose her person as before. Severe wounds had not taught
+her caution. And at length, in a sortie from Compiegne (whether through
+treacherous collusion on the part of her own friends is doubtful to this
+day), she was made prisoner by the Burgundians, and finally surrendered
+to the English.
+
+Now came her trial. This trial, moving of course under English
+influence, was conducted in chief by the Bishop of Beauvais. He was
+a Frenchman, sold to English interests, and hoping, by favour of the
+English leaders, to reach the highest preferment. "Bishop that art,
+Archbishop that shalt be, Cardinal that mayest be," were the words that
+sounded continually in his ear; and doubtless a whisper of visions still
+higher, of a triple crown, and feet upon the necks of kings, sometimes
+stole into his heart. M. Michelet is anxious to keep us in mind that
+this bishop was but an agent of the English. True. But it does not
+better the case for his countryman that, being an accomplice in the
+crime, making himself the leader in the persecution against the
+helpless girl, he was willing to be all this in the spirit, and with
+the conscious vileness of a cat's-paw. Never from the foundations of the
+earth was there such a trial as this, if it were laid open in all
+its beauty of defence and all its hellishness of attack. Oh, child of
+France! shepherdess, peasant girl! trodden under foot by all around
+thee, how I honour thy flashing intellect, quick as God's lightning, and
+true as God's lightning to its mark, that ran before France and laggard
+Europe by many a century, confounding the malice of the ensnarer, and
+making dumb the oracles of falsehood! Is it not scandalous, is it not
+humiliating to civilization, that, even at this day, France exhibits
+the horrid spectacle of judges examining the prisoner against himself;
+seducing him, by fraud, into treacherous conclusions against his own
+head; using the terrors of their power for extorting confessions from
+the frailty of hope; nay (which is worse), using the blandishments
+of condescension and snaky kindness for thawing into compliances of
+gratitude those whom they had failed to freeze into terror? Wicked
+judges! barbarian jurisprudence!--that, sitting in your own conceit
+on the summits of social wisdom, have yet failed to learn the first
+principles of criminal justice--sit ye humbly and with docility at the
+feet of this girl from Domremy, that tore your webs of cruelty into
+shreds and dust. "Would you examine me as a witness against myself?" was
+the question by which many times she defied their arts. Continually she
+showed that their interrogations were irrelevant to any business before
+the court, or that entered into the ridiculous charges against her.
+General questions were proposed to her on points of casuistical
+divinity; two-edged questions, which not one of themselves could have
+answered, without, on the one side, landing himself in heresy (as then
+interpreted), or, on the other, in some presumptuous expression of
+self-esteem. Next came a wretched Dominican, that pressed her with an
+objection, which, if applied to the Bible, would tax every one of its
+miracles with unsoundness. The monk had the excuse of never having read
+the Bible. M. Michelet has no such excuse; and it makes one blush
+for him, as a philosopher, to find him describing such an argument
+as "weighty," whereas it is but a varied expression of rude Mahometan
+metaphysics. Her answer to this, if there were room to place the whole
+in a clear light, was as shattering as it was rapid. Another thought to
+entrap her by asking what language the angelic visitors of her solitude
+had talked--as though heavenly counsels could want polyglot interpreters
+for every word, or that God needed language at all in whispering
+thoughts to a human heart. Then came a worse devil, who asked her
+whether the Archangel Michael had appeared naked. Not comprehending the
+vile insinuation, Joanna, whose poverty suggested to her simplicity that
+it might be the _costliness_ of suitable robes which caused the demur,
+asked them if they fancied God, who clothed the flowers of the valleys,
+unable to find raiment for his servants. The answer of Joanna moves
+a smile of tenderness, but the disappointment of her judges makes one
+laugh exultingly. Others succeeded by troops, who upbraided her with
+leaving her father; as if that greater Father, whom she believed herself
+to have been serving, did not retain the power of dispensing with his
+own rules, or had not said that for a less cause than martyrdom man and
+woman should leave both father and mother.
+
+On Easter Sunday, when the trial had been long proceeding, the poor girl
+fell so ill as to cause a belief that she had been poisoned. It was
+not poison. Nobody had any interest in hastening a death so certain. M.
+Michelet, whose sympathies with all feelings are so quick that one would
+gladly see them always as justly directed, reads the case most truly.
+Joanna had a twofold malady. She was visited by a paroxysm of the
+complaint called _homesickness_. The cruel nature of her imprisonment,
+and its length, could not but point her solitary thoughts, in darkness
+and in chains (for chained she was), to Domremy. And the season,
+which was the most heavenly period of the spring, added stings to this
+yearning. That was one of her maladies--_nostalgia_, as medicine calls
+it; the other was weariness and exhaustion from daily combats with
+malice. She saw that everybody hated her and thirsted for her blood;
+nay, many kind-hearted creatures that would have pitied her profoundly,
+as regarded all political charges, had their natural feelings warped by
+the belief that she had dealings with fiendish powers. She knew she was
+to die; that was _not_ the misery! the misery was that this consummation
+could not be reached without so much intermediate strife, as if she were
+contending for some chance (where chance was none) of happiness, or were
+dreaming for a moment of escaping the inevitable. Why, then, _did_
+she contend? Knowing that she would reap nothing from answering her
+persecutors, why did she not retire by silence from the superfluous
+contest? It was because her quick and eager loyalty to truth would not
+suffer her to see it darkened by frauds which _she_ could expose, but
+others, even of candid listeners, perhaps, could not; it was through
+that imperishable grandeur of soul which taught her to submit meekly
+and without a struggle to her punishment, but taught her _not_
+to submit--no, not for a moment--to calumny as to facts, or to
+misconstruction as to motives. Besides, there were secretaries all
+around the court taking down her words. That was meant for no good to
+_her_. But the end does not always correspond to the meaning. And
+Joanna might say to herself, "These words that will be used against me
+to-morrow and the next day, perhaps, in some nobler generation, may rise
+again for my justification." Yes, Joanna, they _are_ rising even now in
+Paris, and for more than justification!
+
+Woman, sister, there are some things which you do not execute as well as
+your brother, man; no, nor ever will. Pardon me if I doubt whether
+you will ever produce a great poet from your choirs, or a Mozart, or
+a Phidias, or a Michael Angelo, or a great philosopher, or a great
+scholar. By which last is meant--not one who depends simply on an
+infinite memory, but also on an infinite and electrical power of
+combination; bringing together from the four winds, like the angel of
+the resurrection, what else were dust from dead men's bones, into the
+unity of breathing life. If you _can_ create yourselves into any of
+these great creators, why have you not?
+
+Yet, sister woman, though I cannot consent to find a Mozart or a Michael
+Angelo in your sex, cheerfully, and with the love that burns in depths
+of admiration, I acknowledge that you can do one thing as well as the
+best of us men--a greater thing than even Milton is known to have done,
+or Michael Angelo; you can die grandly, and as goddesses would die, were
+goddesses mortal. If any distant worlds (which _may_ be the case) are
+so far ahead of us Tellurians in optical resources as to see distinctly
+through their telescopes all that we do on earth, what is the grandest
+sight to which we ever treat them? St. Peter's at Rome, do you fancy,
+on Easter Sunday, or Luxor, or perhaps the Himalayas? Oh, no! my friend;
+suggest something better; these are baubles to _them_; they see in other
+worlds, in their own, far better toys of the same kind. These, take my
+word for it, are nothing. Do you give it up? The finest thing, then, we
+have to show them is a scaffold on the morning of execution. I assure
+you there is a strong muster in those far telescopic worlds, on any
+such morning, of those who happen to find themselves occupying the right
+hemisphere for a peep at _us_. How, then, if it be announced in some
+such telescopic world by those who make a livelihood of catching
+glimpses at our newspapers, whose language they have long since
+deciphered, that the poor victim in the morning's sacrifice is a woman?
+How, if it be published in that distant world that the sufferer wears
+upon her head, in the eyes of many, the garlands of martyrdom? How, if
+it should be some Marie Antoinette, the widowed queen, coming forward on
+the scaffold, and presenting to the morning air her head, turned gray by
+sorrow--daughter of Caesars kneeling down humbly to kiss the guillotine,
+as one that worships death? How, if it were the noble Charlotte Corday,
+that in the bloom of youth, that with the loveliest of persons, that
+with homage waiting upon her smiles wherever she turned her face to
+scatter them--homage that followed those smiles as surely as the carols
+of birds, after showers in spring, follow the reappearing sun and the
+racing of sunbeams over the hills--yet thought all these things cheaper
+than the dust upon her sandals, in comparison of deliverance from hell
+for her dear suffering France! Ah! these were spectacles indeed for
+those sympathising people in distant worlds; and some, perhaps, would
+suffer a sort of martyrdom themselves, because they could not testify
+their wrath, could not bear witness to the strength of love and to the
+fury of hatred that burned within them at such scenes, could not
+gather into golden urns some of that glorious dust which rested in the
+catacombs of earth.
+
+On the Wednesday after Trinity Sunday in 1431, being then about nineteen
+years of age, the Maid of Arc underwent her martyrdom. She was conducted
+before mid-day, guarded by eight hundred spearmen, to a platform of
+prodigious height, constructed of wooden billets supported by occasional
+walls of lath and plaster, and traversed by hollow spaces in every
+direction for the creation of air currents. The pile "struck terror,"
+says M. Michelet, "by its height"; and, as usual, the English purpose
+in this is viewed as one of pure malignity. But there are two ways of
+explaining all that. It is probable that the purpose was merciful. On
+the circumstances of the execution I shall not linger. Yet, to mark the
+almost fatal felicity of M. Michelet in finding out whatever may injure
+the English name, at a moment when every reader will be interested
+in Joanna's personal appearance, it is really edifying to notice the
+ingenuity by which he draws into light from a dark corner a very unjust
+account of it, and neglects, though lying upon the highroad, a very
+pleasing one. Both are from English pens. Grafton, a chronicler, but
+little read, being a stiff-necked John Bull, thought fit to say that
+no wonder Joanna should be a virgin, since her "foule face" was a
+satisfactory solution of that particular merit. Holinshead, on the other
+hand, a chronicler somewhat later, every way more important, and at
+one time universally read, has given a very pleasing testimony to the
+interesting character of Joanna's person and engaging manners. Neither
+of these men lived till the following century, so that personally this
+evidence is none at all. Grafton sullenly and carelessly believed as
+he wished to believe; Holinshead took pains to inquire, and reports
+undoubtedly the general impression of France. But I cite the case
+as illustrating M. Michelet's candour. [Footnote: Amongst the many
+ebullitions of M. Michelet's fury against us poor English are four which
+will be likely to amuse the reader; and they are the more conspicuous
+in collision with the justice which he sometimes does us, and the very
+indignant admiration which, under some aspects, he grants to us. 1. Our
+English literature he admires with some gnashing of teeth. He pronounces
+it "fine and sombre," but, I lament to add, "skeptical, Judaic,
+Satanic--in a word, antichristian." That Lord Byron should figure as a
+member of this diabolical corporation will not surprise men. It _will_
+surprise them to hear that Milton is one of its Satanic leaders. Many
+are the generous and eloquent Frenchmen, besides Chateaubriand, who
+have, in the course of the last thirty years, nobly suspended their own
+burning nationality, in order to render a more rapturous homage at the
+feet of Milton; and some of them have raised Milton almost to a level
+with angelic natures. Not one of them has thought of looking for him
+_below_ the earth. As to Shakspere, M. Michelet detects in him a most
+extraordinary mare's nest. It is this: he does "not recollect to have
+seen the name of God" in any part of his works. On reading such words,
+it is natural to rub one's eyes, and suspect that all one has ever seen
+in this world may have been a pure ocular delusion. In particular, I
+begin myself to suspect that the word "_la gloire_" never occurs in any
+Parisian journal. "The great English nation," says M. Michelet, "has one
+immense profound vice"--to wit, "pride." Why, really, that may be true;
+but we have a neighbour not absolutely clear of an "immense profound
+vice," as like ours in colour and shape as cherry to cherry. In short,
+M. Michelet thinks us, by fits and starts, admirable--only that we are
+detestable; and he would adore some of our authors, were it not that so
+intensely he could have wished to kick them.
+
+2. M. Michelet thinks to lodge an arrow in our sides by a very odd
+remark upon Thomas a Kempis: which is, that a man of any conceivable
+European blood--a Finlander, suppose, or a Zantiote--might have written
+Tom; only not an Englishman. Whether an Englishman could have forged Tom
+must remain a matter of doubt, unless the thing had been tried long ago.
+That problem was intercepted for ever by Tom's perverseness in choosing
+to manufacture himself. Yet, since nobody is better aware than M.
+Michelet that this very point of Kempis _having_ manufactured Kempis is
+furiously and hopelessly litigated, three or four nations claiming to
+have forged his work for him, the shocking old doubt will raise
+its snaky head once more--whether this forger, who rests in so much
+darkness, might not, after all, be of English blood. Tom, it may be
+feared, is known to modern English literature chiefly by an irreverent
+mention of his name in a line of Peter Pindar's (Dr Wolcot) fifty years
+back, where he is described as
+
+        "Kempis Tom,
+  Who clearly shows the way to Kingdom Come"
+
+Few in these days can have read him, unless in the Methodist version of
+John Wesley Among those few, however, happens to be myself, which arose
+from the accident of having, when a boy of eleven, received a copy of
+the "De Imitatione Christi" as a bequest from a relation who died
+very young, from which cause, and from the external prettiness of
+the book--being a Glasgow reprint by the celebrated Foulis, and gaily
+bound--I was induced to look into it, and finally read it many times
+over, partly out of some sympathy which, even in those days, I had with
+its simplicity and devotional fervour, but much more from the savage
+delight I found in laughing at Tom's Latinity that, I freely grant to M
+Michelet, is inimitable. Yet, after all, it is not certain whether the
+original _was_ Latin. But, however that may have been, if it is possible
+that M Michelet [Footnote: "_If M. Michelet can be accurate_"--However,
+on consideration, this statement does not depend on Michelet. The
+bibliographer Barbier has absolutely _specified_ sixty in a separate
+dissertation, _soixante traductions_ among those even that have not
+escaped the search. The Italian translations are said to be thirty. As
+to mere editions, not counting the early MSS. for half a century before
+printing was introduced, those in Latin amount to 2000, and those in
+French to 1000. Meantime it is very clear to me that this astonishing
+popularity so entirely unparalleled in literature, could not have
+existed except in Roman Catholic times, nor subsequently have lingered
+in any Protestant land. It was the denial of Scripture fountains
+to thirsty lands which made this slender rill of Scripture truth so
+passionately welcome.] can be accurate in saying that there are no
+less than sixty French versions (not editions, observe, but separate
+versions) existing of the "De Imitatione," how prodigious must have
+been the adaptation of the book to the religious heart of the fifteenth
+century! Excepting the Bible, but excepting _that_ only in Protestant
+lands, no book known to man has had the same distinction. It is the most
+marvellous bibliographical fact on record.
+
+3. Our English girls, it seems, are as faulty in one way as we English
+males in another. None of us men could have written the _Opera Omnia_
+of Mr. a Kempis; neither could any of our girls have assumed male attire
+like La Pucelle. But why? Because, says Michelet, English girls and
+German think so much of an indecorum. Well, that is a good fault,
+generally speaking. But M. Michelet ought to have remembered a fact in
+the martyrologies which justifies both parties--the French heroine for
+doing, and the general choir of English girls for _not_ doing. A female
+saint, specially renowned in France, had, for a reason as weighty as
+Joanna's--viz., expressly to shield her modesty among men--worn a male
+military harness. That reason and that example authorised La Pucelle;
+but our English girls, as a body, have seldom any such reason, and
+certainly no such saintly example, to plead. This excuses _them_. Yet,
+still, if it is indispensable to the national character that our young
+women should now and then trespass over the frontier of decorum, it then
+becomes a patriotic duty in me to assure M. Michelet that we _have_ such
+ardent females among us, and in a long series; some detected in naval
+hospitals when too sick to remember their disguise; some on fields
+of battle; multitudes never detected at all; some only suspected; and
+others discharged without noise by war offices and other absurd
+people. In our navy, both royal and commercial, and generally from deep
+remembrances of slighted love, women have sometimes served in disguise
+for many years, taking contentedly their daily allowance of
+burgoo, biscuit, or cannon-balls--anything, in short, digestible or
+indigestible, that it might please Providence to send. One thing, at
+least, is to their credit: never any of these poor masks, with their
+deep silent remembrances, have been detected through murmuring, or what
+is nautically understood by "skulking." So, for once, M. Michelet has an
+_erratum_ to enter upon the fly-leaf of his book in presentation copies.
+
+4. But the last of these ebullitions is the most lively. We English, at
+Orleans, and after Orleans (which is not quite so extraordinary, if
+all were told), fled before the Maid of Arc. Yes, says M. Michelet, you
+_did_: deny it, if you can. Deny it, _mon cher_? I don't mean to
+deny it. Running away, in many cases, is a thing so excellent that no
+philosopher would, at times, condescend to adopt any other step. All of
+us nations in Europe, without one exception, have shown our philosophy
+in that way at times. Even people "_qui ne se rendent pas_" have deigned
+both to run and to shout, "_Sauve qui peut_!" at odd times of sunset;
+though, for my part, I have no pleasure in recalling unpleasant
+remembrances to brave men; and yet, really, being so philosophic, they
+ought _not_ to be unpleasant. But the amusing feature in M. Michelet's
+reproach is the way in which he _improves_ and varies against us the
+charge of running, as if he were singing a catch. Listen to him: They
+"_showed their backs_" did these English. (Hip, hip, hurrah! three times
+three!) "_Behind good walls they let themselves be taken_." (Hip, hip!
+nine times nine!) They "_ran as fast as their legs could carry them_"
+(Hurrah! twenty-seven times twenty-seven!) They "_ran before a girl_";
+they did. (Hurrah! eighty-one times eighty-one!) This reminds one of
+criminal indictments on the old model in English courts, where (for fear
+the prisoner should escape) the crown lawyer varied the charge perhaps
+through forty counts. The law laid its guns so as to rake the accused
+at every possible angle. While the indictment was reading, he seemed a
+monster of crime in his own eyes; and yet, after all, the poor fellow
+had but committed one offence, and not always _that_. N. B.--Not having
+the French original at hand, I make my quotations from a friend's copy
+of Mr. Walter Kelly's translation; which seems to me faithful, spirited,
+and idiomatically English--liable, in fact, only to the single reproach
+of occasional provincialisms.]
+
+The circumstantial incidents of the execution, unless with more space
+than I can now command, I should be unwilling to relate. I should fear
+to injure, by imperfect report, a martyrdom which to myself appears so
+unspeakably grand. Yet, for a purpose, pointing not at Joanna, but at M.
+Michelet--viz, to convince him that an Englishman is capable of thinking
+more highly of La Pucelle than even her admiring countrymen--I shall,
+in parting, allude to one or two traits in Joanna's demeanour on the
+scaffold, and to one or two in that of the bystanders, which authorise
+me in questioning an opinion of his upon this martyr's firmness. The
+reader ought to be reminded that Joanna D'Arc was subjected to an
+unusually unfair trial of opinion. Any of the elder Christian martyrs
+had not much to fear of _personal_ rancour. The martyr was chiefly
+regarded as the enemy of Caesar; at times, also, where any knowledge
+of the Christian faith and morals existed, with the enmity that arises
+spontaneously in the worldly against the spiritual. But the martyr,
+though disloyal, was not supposed to be therefore anti-national; and
+still less was _individually_ hateful. What was hated (if anything)
+belonged to his class, not to himself separately. Now, Joanna, if hated
+at all, was hated personally, and in Rouen on national grounds. Hence
+there would be a certainty of calumny arising against _her_ such as
+would not affect martyrs in general. That being the case, it would
+follow of necessity that some people would impute to her a willingness
+to recant. No innocence could escape _that_. Now, had she really
+testified this willingness on the scaffold, it would have argued nothing
+at all but the weakness of a genial nature shrinking from the instant
+approach of torment. And those will often pity that weakness most who,
+in their own persons, would yield to it least. Meantime, there never
+was a calumny uttered that drew less support from the recorded
+circumstances. It rests upon no _positive_ testimony, and it has a
+weight of contradicting testimony to stem. And yet, strange to say, M,
+Michelet, who at times seems to admire the Maid of Arc as much as I do,
+is the one sole writer among her _friends_ who lends some countenance to
+this odious slander. His words are that, if she did not utter this word
+_recant_ with her lips, she uttered it in her heart. "Whether she _said_
+the word is uncertain; but I affirm that she _thought_ it."
+
+Now, I affirm that she did not; not in any sense of the word "_thought_"
+applicable to the case. Here is France calumniating La Pucelle; here
+is England defending her. M. Michelet can only mean that, on _a priori_
+principles, every woman must be presumed liable to such a weakness; that
+Joanna was a woman; _ergo_, that she was liable to such a weakness. That
+is, he only supposes her to have uttered the word by an argument which
+presumes it impossible for anybody to have done otherwise. I, on the
+contrary, throw the onus of the argument not on presumable tendencies of
+nature, but on the known facts of that morning's execution, as recorded
+by multitudes. What else, I demand, than mere weight of metal, absolute
+nobility of deportment, broke the vast line of battle then arrayed
+against her? What else but her meek, saintly demeanour won, from the
+enemies that till now had believed her a witch, tears of rapturous
+admiration? "Ten thousand men," says M. Michelet himself--"ten thousand
+men wept"; and of these ten thousand the majority were political enemies
+knitted together by cords of superstition. What else was it but her
+constancy, united with her angelic gentleness, that drove the fanatic
+English soldier--who had sworn to throw a fagot on her scaffold as _his_
+tribute of abhorrence, that _did_ so, that fulfilled his vow--suddenly
+to turn away a penitent for life, saying everywhere that he had seen
+a dove rising upon wings to heaven from the ashes where she had stood?
+What else drove the executioner to kneel at every shrine for pardon to
+_his_ share in the tragedy? And, if all this were insufficient, then I
+cite the closing act of her life as valid on her behalf, were all other
+testimonies against her. The executioner had been directed to apply his
+torch from below. He did so. The fiery smoke rose upward in billowing
+volumes. A Dominican monk was then standing almost at her side. Wrapped
+up in his sublime office, he saw not the danger, but still persisted
+in his prayers. Even then, when the last enemy was racing up the fiery
+stairs to seize her, even at that moment did this noblest of girls think
+only for _him_, the one friend that would not forsake her, and not
+for herself; bidding him with her last breath to care for his own
+preservation, but to leave _her_ to God. That girl, whose latest breath
+ascended in this sublime expression of self-oblivion, did not utter the
+word _recant_ either with her lips or in her heart. No; she did not,
+though one should rise from the dead to swear it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Bishop of Beauvais! thy victim died in fire upon a scaffold--thou upon
+a down bed. But, for the departing minutes of life, both are oftentimes
+alike. At the farewell crisis, when the gates of death are opening, and
+flesh is resting from its struggles, oftentimes the tortured and the
+torturer have the same truce from carnal torment; both sink together
+into sleep; together both sometimes kindle into dreams. When the mortal
+mists were gathering fast upon you two, bishop and shepherd girl--when
+the pavilions of life were closing up their shadowy curtains about
+you--let us try, through the gigantic glooms, to decipher the flying
+features of your separate visions.
+
+The shepherd girl that had delivered France--she, from her dungeon,
+she, from her baiting at the stake, she, from her duel with fire, as she
+entered her last dream--saw Domremy, saw the fountain of Domremy, saw
+the pomp of forests in which her childhood had wandered. That
+Easter festival which man had denied to her languishing heart--that
+resurrection of springtime, which the darkness of dungeons had
+intercepted from _her_, hungering after the glorious liberty of
+forests--were by God given back into her hands as jewels that had been
+stolen from her by robbers. With those, perhaps (for the minutes of
+dreams can stretch into ages), was given back to her by God the bliss
+of childhood. By special privilege for _her_ might be created, in this
+farewell dream, a second childhood, innocent as the first; but not,
+like _that_, sad with the gloom of a fearful mission in the rear. This
+mission had now been fulfilled. The storm was weathered; the skirts even
+of that mighty storm were drawing off. The blood that she was to reckon
+for had been exacted; the tears that she was to shed in secret had
+been paid to the last. The hatred to herself in all eyes had been faced
+steadily, had been suffered, had been survived. And in her last fight
+upon the scaffold she had triumphed gloriously; victoriously she had
+tasted the stings of death. For all, except this comfort from her
+farewell dream, she had died--died amid the tears of ten thousand
+enemies--died amid the drums and trumpets of armies--died amid peals
+redoubling upon peals, volleys upon volleys, from the saluting clarions
+of martyrs.
+
+Bishop of Beauvais! because the guilt-burdened man is in dreams haunted
+and waylaid by the most frightful of his crimes, and because upon that
+fluctuating mirror--rising (like the mocking mirrors of _mirage_ in
+Arabian deserts) from the fens of death-most of all are reflected the
+sweet countenances which the man has laid in ruins; therefore I know,
+bishop, that you also, entering your final dream, saw Domremy. That
+fountain, of which the witnesses spoke so much, showed itself to your
+eyes in pure morning dews; but neither dews, nor the holy dawn, could
+cleanse away the bright spots of innocent blood upon its surface. By
+the fountain, bishop, you saw a woman seated, that hid her face. But,
+as _you_ draw near, the woman raises her wasted features. Would Domremy
+know them again for the features of her child? Ah, but _you_ know them,
+bishop, well! Oh, mercy! what a groan was _that_ which the servants,
+waiting outside the bishop's dream at his bedside, heard from his
+labouring heart, as at this moment he turned away from the fountain and
+the woman, seeking rest in the forests afar off. Yet not _so_ to escape
+the woman, whom once again he must behold before he dies. In the forests
+to which he prays for pity, will he find a respite? What a tumult, what
+a gathering of feet is there! In glades where only wild deer should run
+armies and nations are assembling; towering in the fluctuating crowd
+are phantoms that belong to departed hours. There is the great English
+Prince, Regent of France. There is my Lord of Winchester, the princely
+cardinal, that died and made no sign. There is the bishop of Beauvais,
+clinging to the shelter of thickets. What building is that which hands
+so rapid are raising? Is it a martyr's scaffold? Will they burn the
+child of Domremy a second time? No; it is a tribunal that rises to the
+clouds; and two nations stand around it, waiting for a trial. Shall my
+Lord of Beauvais sit again upon the judgment-seat, and again number the
+hours for the innocent? Ah, no! he is the prisoner at the bar. Already
+all is waiting: the mighty audience is gathered, the Court is hurrying
+to their seats, the witnesses are arrayed, the trumpets are sounding,
+the judge is taking his place. Oh, but this is sudden! My lord, have you
+no counsel? "Counsel I have none; in heaven above, or on earth beneath,
+counsellor there is none now that would take a brief from _me_: all
+are silent." Is it, indeed, come to this? Alas! the time is short, the
+tumult is wondrous, the crowd stretches away into infinity; but yet I
+will search in it for somebody to take your brief; I know of somebody
+that will be your counsel. Who is this that cometh from Domremy? Who is
+she in bloody coronation robes from Rheims? Who is she that cometh with
+blackened flesh from walking the furnaces of Rouen? This is she, the
+shepherd girl, counsellor that had none for herself, whom I choose,
+bishop, for yours. She it is, I engage, that shall take my lord's brief.
+She it is, bishop, that would plead for you; yes, bishop, _she_--when
+heaven and earth are silent.
+
+
+
+
+NOTES
+
+THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH
+
+
+"In October 1849 there appeared in _Blackwood's Magazine_ an article
+entitled _The English Mail-Coach, or the Glory of Motion_. There was
+no intimation that it was to be continued; but in December 1849 there
+followed in the same magazine an article in two sections, headed by a
+paragraph explaining that it was by the author of the previous article
+in the October number, and was to be taken in connexion with that
+article. One of the sections of this second article was entitled _The
+Vision of Sudden Death_, and the other _Dream-Fugue on the above
+theme of Sudden Death_. When De Quincey revised the papers in 1854 for
+republication in volume iv of the Collective Edition of his writings,
+he brought the whole under the one general title of _The English
+Mail-Coach_, dividing the text, as at present, into three sections or
+chapters, the first with the sub-title _The Glory of Motion_, the second
+with the sub-title _The Vision of Sudden Death_, and the third with the
+sub-title _Dream-Fugue, founded on the preceding theme of Sudden Death_.
+Great care was bestowed on the revision. Passages that had appeared in
+the magazine articles were omitted; new sentences were inserted; and
+the language was retouched throughout."--MASSON. Cf. as to the revision,
+Professor Dowden's article, "How De Quincey worked," _Saturday Review_,
+Feb. 23, 1895. This selection is found in _Works_, Masson's ed., Vol.
+XIII, pp. 270-327; Riverside ed., Vol. I, pp. 517-582.
+
+1 6 HE HAD MARRIED THE DAUGHTER OF A DUKE: "Mr. John Palmer, a native of
+Bath, and from about 1768 the energetic proprietor of the Theatre Royal
+in that city, had been led, by the wretched state in those days of
+the means of intercommunication between Bath and London, wand his own
+consequent difficulties in arranging for a punctual succession of good
+actors at his theatre, to turn his attention to the improvement of the
+whole system of Post-Office conveyance, and of locomotive machinery
+generally, in the British Islands. The result was a scheme for
+superseding, on the great roads at least, the then existing system of
+sluggish and irregular stage-coaches, the property of private persons
+and companies, by a new system of government coaches, in connexion
+with the Post-Office, carrying the mails and also a regulated number of
+passengers, with clockwork precision, at a rate of comparative speed,
+which he hoped should ultimately be not less than ten miles an hour. The
+opposition to the scheme was, of course, enormous; coach proprietors,
+innkeepers, the Post-Office officials themselves, were all against
+Mr. Palmer; he was voted a crazy enthusiast and a public bore.
+Pitt, however, when the scheme was submitted to him, recognized its
+feasibility; on the 8th of August 1784 the first mail-coach on Mr.
+Palmer's plan started from London at 8 o'clock in the morning and
+reached Bristol at 11 o'clock at night; and from that day the success of
+the new system was assured.--Mr. Palmer himself, having been appointed
+Surveyor and Comptroller-General of the Post-Office, took rank as an
+eminent and wealthy public man, M. P. for Bath and what not, and lived
+till 1818. De Quincey makes it one of his distinctions that he "had
+married the daughter of a duke," and in a footnote to that paragraph he
+gives the lady's name as "Lady Madeline Gordon." From an old Debrett,
+however, I learn that Lady Madelina Gordon, second daughter of
+Alexander, fourth Duke of Gordon, was first married, on the 3d of April
+1789, to Sir Robert Sinclair, Bart., and next, on the 25th of November
+1805, to _Charles Palmer, of Lockley Park, Berks, Esq._ If Debrett is
+right, her second husband was not John Palmer of Mail-Coach celebrity,
+and De Quincey is wrong."--MASSON.
+
+1 (footnote) INVENTION OF THE CROSS: Concerning the _Inventio sanctae
+crucis_, see Smith, _Dictionary of Christian Antiquities_, Vol. I, p.
+503.
+
+2 4 NATIONAL RESULT: Cf. De Quincey's paper on _Travelling, Works,_
+Riverside ed., Vol. II, especially pp. 313-314; Masson's ed., Vol. I,
+especially pp. 270-271.
+
+3 13 THE FOUR TERMS OF MICHAELMAS, LENT, EASTER, AND ACT: These might
+be called respectively the autumn, winter, spring, and summer terms.
+Michaelmas, the feast of St. Michael and All Angels, is on September
+29. Hilary and Trinity are other names for Lent term and Act term
+respectively. Act term is the last term of the academic year; its name
+is that originally given to a disputation for a Master's degree; such
+disputations took place at the end of the year generally, and hence gave
+a name to the summer term. Although the rules concerning residence
+at Oxford are more stringent than in De Quincey's time, only eighteen
+weeks' residence is required during the year, six in Michaelmas, six in
+Lent, and six in Easter and Act.
+
+3 17 GOING DOWN: Cf. "Going down with victory," i.e. from London into
+the country.
+
+3 30 POSTING-HOUSES: inns where relays of horses were furnished for
+coaches and carriages. Cf. De Quincey on _Travelling, loc. cit._
+
+4 3 AN OLD TRADITION... from the reign of Charles II: Then no one sat
+outside; later, outside places were taken by servants, and were quite
+cheap.
+
+4 9 ATTAINT THE FOOT: The word is used in its legal sense. The blood of
+one convicted of high treason is "attaint," and his deprivations extend
+to his descendants, unless Parliament remove the attainder.
+
+4 14 PARIAHS: The fate of social outcasts seems to have taken early and
+strong hold upon De Quincey's mind; one of the _Suspiria_ was to have
+enlarged upon this theme. Strictly speaking, the Pariahs is that one of
+the lower castes of Hindoo society of which foreigners have seen most;
+it is not in all districts the lowest caste, however.
+
+5 6 OBJECTS NOT APPEARING, ETC.: _De non apparentibus et non
+existentibus eadem est lex_, a Roman legal phrase.
+
+5 16 "SNOBS": Apparently snob originally meant "shoemaker"; then, in
+university cant, a "townsman" as opposed to a "gownsman." Cf. _Gradus ad
+Cantabrigiam_ (1824), quoted in _Century Dictionary_: "_Snobs_.--A term
+applied indiscriminately to all who have not the honour of being members
+of the university; but in a more particular manner to the 'profanum
+vulgus,' the tag-rag and bob-tail, who vegetate on the sedgy banks of
+Camus." This use is in De Quincey's mind. Later, in the strikes of that
+time, the workmen who accepted lower wages were called _snobs_; those
+who held out for higher, _nobs_.
+
+7 33 FO FO... FI FI: "This paragraph is a caricature of a story told
+in Staunton's Account of the Earl of Macartney's Embassy to China in
+1792."--MASSON.
+
+8 4 CA IRA ("This will do," "This is the go"): "a proverb of the French
+Revolutionists when they were hanging the aristocrats in the streets,
+&c., and the burden of one of the most popular revolutionary songs, 'Ca
+ira, ca ira, ca ira.'"--MASSON.
+
+8 18 ALL MORALITY,--ARISTOTLE'S, ZENO'S, CICERO'S: Each of these three
+has a high place in the history of ethical teaching. Aristotle wrote
+the so-called _Nicomachean Ethics_. According to his teaching, "ethical
+virtue is that permanent direction of the will which guards the mean
+[_to meson_] proper for us... Bravery is the mean between cowardice
+and temerity; temperance, the mean between inordinate desire and stupid
+indifference; etc." (Ueberweg, _History of Philosophy_, Vol. I, p. 169).
+Zeno, who died about 264 B.C., founded about 308 the Stoic sect, which
+took its name from the "Painted Porch" (_Stoa poklae_) in the Agora at
+Athens, where the master taught. The Stoics held that men should be free
+from passion, and undisturbed by joy or grief, submitting themselves
+uncomplainingly to their fate. Such austere views are, of course, as far
+as possible removed from those of the Eudaemonist, who sought happiness
+as the end of life. Cicero was the author of De Officiis, "Of Duties."
+
+9 9 ASTROLOGICAL SHADOWS: misfortunes due to being born under an unlucky
+star; house of life is also an astrological term.
+
+9 24 VON TROIL'S ICELAND: The Letters on Iceland (Pinkerton's Voyages
+and Travels, Vol. I, p. 621), containing Observations ... made during
+a Voyage undertaken in the year 1772, by Uno Von Troil, D.D., of
+Stockholm, contains no chapter of the kind. Such a chapter had appeared,
+however, in N. Horrebow's (Danish, 1758) Natural History of Iceland:
+"Chap. LXXII. Concerning snakes. No snakes of any kind are to be met
+with throughout the whole island." In Boswell's Johnson, Vol. IV, p.
+314, Temple ed., there is a much more correct allusion, which may have
+been in De Quincey's mind: "Langton said very well to me afterwards,
+that he could repeat Johnson's conversation before dinner, as Johnson
+had said that he could repeat a complete chapter of The Natural History
+of Iceland, from the Danish of Horrebow, the whole of which was exactly
+thus: 'Chap. LXXII. Concerning Snakes. There are no snakes to be met
+with throughout the whole island.'"
+
+9 25 A PARLIAMENTARY RAT: one who deserts his own party when it is
+losing.
+
+10 16 "JAM PROXIMUS," etc.: AEneid, II, lines 311-312: "Now next (to
+Deiphobus' house) Ucalegon (i.e. his house) blazes!"
+
+11 27 QUARTERINGS: See p. 47, footnote, and note 47 2.
+
+11 32 WITHIN BENEFIT OF CLERGY: Benefit of clergy was, under old English
+law, the right of clerics, afterward extended to all who could read, to
+plead exemption from trial before a secular judge. This privilege was
+first legally recognized in 1274, and was not wholly abolished until
+1827.
+
+12 9 QUARTER SESSIONS: This court is held in England in the counties by
+justices of the peace for the trial of minor criminal offenses and to
+administer the poor laws, etc.
+
+12 26 FALSE ECHOES OF MARENGO: General Desaix was shot through the heart
+at the battle of Marengo (June 14, 1800); he died without a word, and
+his body was found by Rovigo (cf. Memoirs of the Duke of Rovigo, London,
+1835, Vol. I, p. 181), "stripped of his clothes, and surrounded by other
+naked bodies." Napoleon, however, published three different versions
+of an heroic and devoted message from Desaix to himself, the original
+version being: "Go, tell the First Consul that I die with this
+regret,--that I have not done enough for posterity." (Cf. Lanfrey,
+History of Napoleon the First, 2d ed., London, 1886, Vol. II, p. 39.)
+Napoleon himself was credited likewise with the words De Quincey adopts.
+"Why is it not permitted me to weep" is one version (Bussey, _History
+of Napoleon_, London, 1840, Vol. I, p. 302). Cf. Hazlitt, _Life of
+Napoleon_, 2d ed., London, 1852, Vol. II, p. 317, footnote.
+
+12 (footnote) THE CRY OF THE FOUNDERING LINE-OF-BATTLE SHIP "VENGEUR":
+On the 1st of June, 1794, the English fleet under Lord Howe defeated the
+French under Villaret-Joyeuse, taking six ships and sinking a seventh,
+the _Vengeur_. This ship sank, as a matter of fact, with part of her
+crew on board, imploring kid which there was not time to give them. Some
+two hundred and fifty men had been taken off by the English; the rest
+were lost. On the 9th of July Barrere published a report setting forth
+"how the _Vengeur_, ... being entirely disabled, ... refused to strike,
+though sinking; how the enemies fired on her, but she returned
+their fire, shot aloft all her tricolor streamers, shouted _Vive la
+Republique_, ... and so, in this mad whirlwind of fire and shouting
+and invincible despair, went down into the ocean depths; _Vive la
+Republique_ and a universal volley from the upper deck being the last
+sounds she made." Cf. Carlyle, _Sinking of the Vengeur_, and _French
+Revolution, Book_ XVIII, Chap. VI.
+
+12 (footnote) LA GARDE MEURT, ETC.: "This phrase, attributed to
+Cambronne, who was made prisoner at Waterloo, was vehemently denied by
+him. It was invented by Rougemont, a prolific author of _mots_, two
+days after the battle, in the _Independant_."--Fournier's _L'Esprit dans
+l'Histoire_, trans. Bartlett, _Familiar Quotations_, p. 661.
+
+13 25 BRUMMAGEM: Birmingham became early the chief place of manufacture
+of cheap wares. Hence the name _Brummagem_, a vulgar pronunciation of
+the name of the city, has become in England a common name for cheap,
+tawdry jewelry. Cf. also Shakespeare, Richard III, Act I, sc. iv, 1. 55:
+
+  False, fleeting, perjured Clarence.
+
+13 27 LUXOR occupies part of the site of ancient Thebes, capital of
+Egypt; its antiquities are famous.
+
+14 9 BUT ON OUR SIDE... WAS A TOWER OF MORAL STRENGTH, ETC.: Cf.
+Shakespeare, _Richard_ III, Act V, sc. in, 11. 12-13:
+
+  Besides, the king's name is a tower of strength,
+  Which they upon the adverse party want.
+
+14 20 FELT MY HEART BURN WITHIN ME: Cf. Luke xxiv. 32.
+
+14 32 A VERY FINE STORY FROM ONE OF OUR ELDER DRAMATISTS: The dramatist
+in question has not been identified. I am indebted indirectly to
+Professor W. Strunk, Jr., of Cornell University, for reference to Johann
+Caius' Of English Dogs, translated by A. Fleming, in Arber's English
+Garner, original edition, Vol. III, p. 253 (new edition, Social England
+Illustrated, pp. 28-29), where, after telling how Henry the Seventh,
+perceiving that four mastiffs could overcome a lion, ordered the dogs
+all hanged, the writer continues: "I read an history answerable to
+this, of the selfsame HENRY, who having a notable and an excellent
+fair falcon, it fortuned that the King's Falconers, in the presence and
+hearing of his Grace, highly commended his Majesty's Falcon, saying,
+that it feared not to intermeddle with an eagle, it was so venturous and
+so mighty a bird; which when the king heard, he charged that the falcon
+should be killed without delay: for the selfsame reason, as it may seem,
+which was rehearsed in the conclusion of the former history concerning
+the same king."
+
+15 l OMRAHS... FROM AGRA AND LAHORE: There seems to be a reminiscence
+here of Wordsworth's Prelude, Book X, 11. 18-20:
+
+  The Great Mogul, when he
+  Erewhile went forth from Agra or Lahore,
+  Rajahs and Omrahs in his train.
+
+Omrah, which is not found in Century Dictionary, is itself really plural
+of Arabic amir (ameer), a commander, nobleman.
+
+15 23 THE 6TH OF EDWARD LONGSHANKS: a De Quinceyan jest, of course. This
+wrould refer to a law of the sixth year of Edward I, or 1278, but there
+are but fifteen chapters in the laws of that year.
+
+16 8 NOT MAGNA LOQUIMUR,... BUT VIVIMUS: not "we speak great things,"
+but "we live" them.
+
+17 21 MARLBOROUGH FOREST is twenty-seven miles east of Bath, where De
+Quincey attended school.
+
+18 18 ULYSSES, ETC.: The allusion is, of course, to the slaughter of
+the suitors of Penelope, his wife, by Ulysses, after his return. Cf.
+Odyssey, Books XXI-XXII.
+
+19 3 ABOUT WATERLOO: i.e. about 1815. This phrase is one of many that
+indicate the deep impression made by this event upon the English mind.
+Cf. p. 58.
+
+19 17 "SAY, ALL OUR PRAISES," ETC.: Cf. Pope, Moral Essays: Epistle III,
+Of the Use of Riches, II. 249-250:
+
+  But all our praises why should lords engross,
+  Rise, honest Muse! and sing the Man of Ross.
+
+20 3 TURRETS: "Tourettes fyled rounde" appears in Chaucer's Knight's
+Tale, 1. 1294, where it means the ring on a dog's collar through which
+the leash was passed. Skeat explains _torets_ as "probably eyes in which
+rings will turn round, because each eye is a little larger than the
+thickness of the ring." Cf. Chaucer's _Treatise on the Astrolabe_, Part
+I, sec. 2, "This ring renneth in a maner turet," "this ring runs in a
+kind of eye." But Chaucer does not refer to harness.
+
+21 2 MR. WATERTON TELLS ME: Charles Waterton, the naturalist, was
+born in 1782 and died in 1865. His _Wanderings in South America_ was
+published in 1825.
+
+23 11 EARTH AND HER CHILDREN: This paragraph is about one fifth of the
+length of the corresponding paragraph as it appeared in _Blackwood_. For
+the longer version see Masson's ed., Vol. XIII, p. 289, note 2.
+
+24 14 THE GENERAL POST-OFFICE: The present office was opened Sept. 23,
+1829. St. Martin's-le-Grand is a church within the "city" of London,
+so named to distinguish it from St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, which faces
+what is now Trafalgar Square, and is, as the name indicates, outside the
+"city." The street takes its name from the church.
+
+28 10 BARNET is a Hertfordshire village, eleven miles north of London.
+
+29 33 A "COURIER" EVENING PAPER, CONTAINING THE GAZETTE: A gazette was
+originally one of the three official papers of the kingdom; afterwards
+any official announcement, as this of a great victory.
+
+30 17 FEY: This is not a Celtic word; it is the Anglo-Saxon _faege_
+retained in Lowland Scotch, which is the most northerly English dialect.
+The word appears frequently in descriptions of battles, the Anglo-Saxon
+fatalistic philosophy teaching that, certain warriors entered the
+conflict _faege_, "doomed." Now the meaning is altered slightly: "You
+are surely fey," would be said in Scotland, as Professor Masson remarks,
+to a person observed to be in extravagantly high spirits, or in any mood
+surprisingly beyond the bounds of his ordinary temperament,--the
+notion being that the excitement is supernatural, and a presage of his
+approaching death, or of some other calamity about to befall him.
+
+31 27 THE INSPIRATION OF GOD, ETC.: This is an indication--more
+interesting than agreeable, perhaps--of the heights to which the martial
+ardor of De Quincey's toryism rises.
+
+33 13 CAESAR THE DICTATOR, AT HIS LAST DINNER-PARTY, ETC.: related by
+Suetonius in his life of Julius Caesar, Chap. LXXXVII: "The day before he
+died, some discourse occurring at dinner in M. Lepidus' house upon that
+subject, which was the most agreeable way of dying, he expressed his
+preference for what is sudden and unexpected" (repentinum inopinatumque
+praetulerat). The story is told by Plutarch and Appian also.
+
+35 13 _BIATHANATOS_: "De Quincey has evidently taken this from John
+Donne's treatise: _BIATHANATOS, A Declaration of that Paradoxe or
+Thesis, That Self-homicide is not so naturally Sin, that it may never be
+otherwise_, 1644. See his paper on _Suicide, etc._, Masson's ed., VIII,
+398 [Riverside, IX, 209]. But not even Donne's precedent justifies the
+word formation. The only acknowledged compounds are _biaio-thanasia_,
+'violent death,' and _biaio-thanatos_, 'dying a violent death.' Even
+_bia thanatos_, 'death by violence,' is not classical."--HART. But the
+form _biathanatos_ is older than Donne and is said to be common in MSS.
+It should be further remarked that neither of the two compounds cited
+is classical. As to De Quincey's interpretation of Caesar's meaning here,
+cf. Merivale's _History of the Romans under the Empire_, Chap.
+XXI, where he translates Caesar's famous reply: "That which is least
+expected." Cf. also Shakespeare, _Julius Caesar_, Act II, sc. ii, 1. 33.
+
+37 25 "NATURE, FROM HER SEAT," ETC.: Cf. Milton's _Paradise Lost_, Book
+IX, 11. 780-784:
+
+  So saying, her rash hand in evil hour
+  Forth reaching to the fruit, she pluck'd, she eat:
+  Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat
+  Sighing through all her works gave signs of woe,
+  That all was lost.
+
+38 2 SO SCENICAL, ETC.: De Quincey's love for effects of this sort
+appears everywhere. Cf. the opening paragraphs of the _Revolt of the
+Tartars_, Masson's ed., Vol. VII; Riverside ed., Vol. XII.
+
+39 4 JUS DOMINII: "the law of ownership," a legal term.
+
+39 14 JUS GENTIUM: "the law of nations," a legal term.
+
+39 30 "MONSTRUM HORRENDUM," ETC..: _AEneid_, III, 658. Polyphemus, one of
+the Cyclopes, whose eye was put out by Ulysses, is meant. Cf. _Odyssey_,
+IX, 371 et seq.; _AEneid_, III, 630 _et seq_.
+
+40 1 ONE OF THE CALENDARS, ETC.: The histories of the three Calenders,
+sons of kings, will be found in most selections from the _Arabian
+Nights_. A Calender is one of an order of Dervishes founded in the
+fourteenth century by an Andalusian Arab; they are wanderers who preach
+in market places and live by alms.
+
+40 10 AL SIRAT: According to Mahometan teaching this bridge over Hades
+was in width as a sword's edge. Over it souls must pass to Paradise.
+
+40 12 UNDER THIS EMINENT MAN, ETC.: For these two sentences the
+original in _Blackwood_ had this, with its addition of good De Quinceyan
+doctrine: "I used to call him _Cyclops Mastigophorus_, Cyclops the
+Whip-bearer, until I observed that his skill made whips useless, except
+to fetch off an impertinent fly from a leader's head, upon which
+I changed his Grecian name to _Cyclops Diphrelates_ (Cyclops the
+Charioteer). I, and others known to me, studied under him the
+diphrelatic art. Excuse, reader, a word too elegant to be pedantic. And
+also take this remark from me as a _gage d'amitie_--that no word ever
+was or _can_ be pedantic which, by supporting a distinction, supports
+the accuracy of logic, or which fills up a chasm for the understanding."
+
+41 1 SOME PEOPLE HAVE CALLED ME PROCRASTINATING: Cf. Page's (Japp's)
+_Life_, Chap. XIX, and Japp's _De Quincey Memorials_, Vol. II, pp.
+45,47,49- 42 11 THE WHOLE PAGAN PANTHEON: i.e. all the gods put
+together; from the Greek _Pantheion_, a temple dedicated to all the
+gods.
+
+43 2 SEVEN ATMOSPHERES OF SLEEP, ETC.: Professor Hart suggests that De
+Quincey is here "indulging in jocular arithmetic. The three nights
+plus the three days, plus the present night, equal seven." Dr. Cooper
+compares with this a reference to the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus. But it
+seems doubtful whether any explanation is necessary.
+
+43 17 LILLIPUTIAN LANCASTER: the county town of Lancashire, in which
+Liverpool and Manchester, towns of recent and far greater growth, are
+situated.
+
+44 (footnote) "Giraldus Cambrensis," or Gerald de Barry (1146-1220), was
+a Welsh historian; one of his chief works is the _Itinerarium Cambrica_,
+or Voyage in Wales.
+
+47 2 QUARTERING: De Quincey's derivation of this word in his footnote
+is correct, but its use in this French sense is not common. De Quincey,
+however, has it above, p. 11.
+
+49 8 THE SHOUT OF ACHILLES: Cf. Homer, _Iliad_, XVIII, 217 _et seq_.
+
+50 10 BUYING IT, ETC.: De Quincey refers, no doubt, to the pay of common
+soldiers and to the practice of employing mercenaries.
+
+52 1 FASTER THAN EVER MILL-RACE, ETC.: the change in the wording of this
+sentence in De Quincey's revision is, as Masson remarks, particularly
+characteristic of his sense of melody; it read in _Blackwood_, "We ran
+past them faster than ever mill-race in our inexorable flight."
+
+52 15 HERE WAS THE MAP, ETC.: This sentence is an addition in the
+reprint. Masson remarks "how artistically it causes the due pause
+between the horror as still in rush of transaction and the backward look
+at the wreck when the crash was past."
+
+53 18 "WHENCE THE SOUND," ETC.: _Paradise Lost_, Book XI, 11. 558-563.
+
+54 3 WOMAN'S IONIC FORM: In thus using the word Ionic, De Quincey
+doubtless has in mind the character of Ionic architecture, with its tall
+and graceful column, differing from the severity of the Doric on the one
+hand and from the floridity of the Corinthian on the other. Probably he
+is thinking of a caryatid. Cf. the following version of the old story of
+the origin of the styles of Greek architecture in Vitruvius, IV, Chap. I
+(Gwilt's translation), quoted by Hart: "They measured a man's foot, and
+finding its length the sixth part of his height, they gave the column
+a similar proportion, that is, they made its height six times the
+thickness of the shaft measured at the base. Thus the Doric order
+obtained its proportion, its strength, and its beauty from the human
+figure. With a similar feeling they afterward built the Temple of Diana.
+But in that, seeking a new proportion, they used the female figure as
+a standard; and for the purpose of producing a more lofty effect they
+first made it eight times its thickness in height. Under it they placed
+a base, after the manner of a shoe to the foot; they also added volutes
+to its capital, like graceful curling hair hanging on each side, and the
+front they ornamented with _cymatia_ and festoons in the place of hair.
+On the shafts they sunk channels, which bear a resemblance to the folds
+of a matronal garment. Thus two orders were invented, one of a masculine
+character, without ornament, the other bearing a character which
+resembled the delicacy, ornament, and proportion of a female. The
+successors of these people, improving in taste, and preferring a more
+slender proportion, assigned seven diameters to the height of the Doric
+column, and eight and a half to the Ionic."
+
+55 3 CORYMBI: clusters of fruit or flowers.
+
+55 28 QUARREL: the bolt of a crossbow, an arrow having a square,
+or four-edged head (from Middle Latin _quadrellus_, diminutive of
+_quadrum_, a square).
+
+58 20 WATERLOO AND RECOVERED CHRISTENDOM! Cf. note 19 3.
+
+61 20 THEN A THIRD TIME THE TRUMPET SOUNDED: There are throughout this
+passage, as Dr. Cooper remarks, many reminiscences of the language of
+the Book of Revelation. Cf. this with Revelation viii. 10; cf. 61 28
+with Revelation xii. 5, and 62 5 with ix. 13.
+
+63 29 THE ENDLESS RESURRECTIONS OF HIS LOVE: The following, which Masson
+prints as a postscript, was a part of De Quincey's introduction to the
+volume of the Collective Edition containing this piece:
+
+"'THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH.'--This little paper, according to my original
+intention, formed part of the 'Suspiria de Profundis'; from which, for
+a momentary purpose, I did not scruple to detach it, and to publish it
+apart, as sufficiently intelligible even when dislocated from its place
+in a larger whole. To my surprise, however, one or two critics, not
+carelessly in conversation, but deliberately in print, professed their
+inability to apprehend the meaning of the whole, or to follow the links
+of the connexion between its several parts. I am myself as little
+able to understand where the difficulty lies, or to detect any lurking
+obscurity, as these critics found themselves to unravel my logic.
+Possibly I may not be an indifferent and neutral judge in such a case. I
+will therefore sketch a brief abstract of the little paper according
+to my original design, and then leave the reader to judge how far this
+design is kept in sight through the actual execution.
+
+"Thirty-seven years ago, or rather more, accident made me, in the dead
+of night, and of a night memorably solemn, the solitary witness of an
+appalling scene, which threatened instant death in a shape the most
+terrific to two young people whom I had no means of assisting, except
+in so far as I was able to give them a most hurried warning of their
+danger; but even _that_ not until they stood within the very shadow
+of the catastrophe, being divided from the most frightful of deaths by
+scarcely more, if more at all, than seventy seconds.
+
+"Such was the scene, such in its outline, from which the whole of this
+paper radiates as a natural expansion. This scene is circumstantially
+narrated in Section the Second, entitled 'The Vision of Sudden Death.'
+
+"But a movement of horror, and of spontaneous recoil from this dreadful
+scene, naturally carried the whole of that scene, raised and idealised,
+into my dreams, and very soon into a rolling succession of dreams.
+The actual scene, as looked down upon from the box of the mail, was
+transformed into a dream, as tumultuous and changing as a musical fugue.
+This troubled dream is circumstantially reported in Section the Third,
+entitled 'Dream-Fugue on the theme of Sudden Death.' What I had beheld
+from my seat upon the mail,--the scenical strife of action and passion,
+of anguish and fear, as I had there witnessed them moving in ghostly
+silence,--this duel between life and death narrowing itself to a
+point of such exquisite evanescence as the collision neared; all these
+elements of the scene blended, under the law of association, with
+the previous and permanent features of distinction investing the mail
+itself; which features at that time lay--1st, in velocity unprecedented,
+2dly, in the power and beauty of the horses, 3dly, in the official
+connexion with the government of a great nation, and, 4thly, in the
+function, almost a consecrated function, of publishing and diffusing
+through the land the great political events, and especially the great
+battles, during a conflict of unparalleled grandeur. These honorary
+distinctions are all described circumstantially in the First or
+introductory Section ('The Glory of Motion'). The three first were
+distinctions maintained at all times; but the fourth and grandest
+belonged exclusively to the war with Napoleon; and this it was
+which most naturally introduced Waterloo into the dream. Waterloo, I
+understand, was the particular feature of the 'Dream-Fugue' which my
+censors were least able to account for. Yet surely Waterloo, which, in
+common with every other great battle, it had been our special privilege
+to publish over all the land, most naturally entered the dream under the
+licence of our privilege. If not--if there be anything amiss--let the
+Dream be responsible. The Dream is a law to itself; and as well quarrel
+with a rainbow for showing, or for _not_ showing, a secondary arch.
+So far as I know, every element in the shifting movements of the Dream
+derived itself either primarily from the incidents of the actual scene,
+or from secondary features associated with the mail. For example, the
+cathedral aisle derived itself from the mimic combination of features
+which grouped themselves together at the point of approaching
+collision--viz. an arrow-like section of the road, six hundred yards
+long, under the solemn lights described, with lofty trees meeting
+overhead in arches. The guard's horn, again--a humble instrument in
+itself--was yet glorified as the organ of publication for so many great
+national events. And the incident of the Dying Trumpeter, who rises from
+a marble bas-relief, and carries a marble trumpet to his marble lips
+for the purpose of warning the female infant, was doubtless secretly
+suggested by my own imperfect effort to seize the guard's horn, and to
+blow the warning blast. But the Dream knows best; and the Dream, I say
+again, is the responsible party."
+
+
+JOAN OF ARC
+
+
+This article appeared originally in _Taifs Magazine_ for March and
+August, 1847; it was reprinted by De Quincey in 1854 in the third volume
+of his _Collected Writings_. It is found in _Works_, Masson's ed., Vol.
+V, pp. 384-416; Riverside ed., Vol. VI, pp. 178-215.
+
+64 10 LORRAINE, now in great part in the possession of Germany, is the
+district in which Domremy, Joan's birthplace, is situated.
+
+65 14 VAUCOULEURS: a town near Domremy; cf. p. 70.
+
+65 28 EN CONTUMACE: "in contumacy," a legal term applied to one who,
+when summoned to court, fails to appear.
+
+66 13 ROUEN: the city in Normandy where Joan was burned at the stake.
+
+66 25 THE LILIES OF FRANCE: the royal emblem of France from very early
+times until the Revolution of 1789, when "the wrath of God and man
+combined to wither them."
+
+67 5 M. MICHELET: Jules Michelet (1798-1874) is said to have spent forty
+years in the preparation of his great work, the _History of France_.
+Cf. the same, translated by G. H. Smith, 2 vols., Appleton, Vol. II,
+pp. 119-169; or _Joan of Arc_, from Michelet's _History of France_,
+translated by O. W. Wight, New York, 1858.
+
+67 8 RECOVERED LIBERTY: The Revolution of 1830 had expelled the restored
+Bourbon kings.
+
+67 20 THE BOOK AGAINST PRIESTS: Michelet's lectures as professor of
+history in the College de France, in which he attacked the Jesuits, were
+published as follows: _Des Jesuites_, 1843; _Du Pretre, de la Femme
+et de la Famille_, 1844; _Du Peuple_, 1845. To the second De Quincey
+apparently refers.
+
+67 26 BACK TO THE FALCONER'S LURE: The lure was a decoy used to recall
+the hawk to its perch,--sometimes a dead pigeon, sometimes an artificial
+bird, with some meat attached.
+
+68 6 ON THE MODEL OF LORD PERCY: These lines, as Professor Hart notes,
+in Percy's Folio, ed. Hales and Furnivall, Vol. II, p. 7, run:
+
+  The stout Erle of Northumberland
+    a vow to God did make,
+  his pleasure in the Scottish woods
+    3 som_m_ers days to take.
+
+68 27 PUCELLE D'ORLEANS: Maid of Orleans (the city on the Loire which
+Joan saved).
+
+69 1 THE COLLECTION, ETC.: The work meant is Quicherat, _Proces de
+Condamnation et Rehabilitation de Jeanne d'Arc_, 5 vols., Paris,
+1841-1849. Cf. De Quincey's note.
+
+69 21 DELENDA EST ANGLIA VICTRIX! "Victorious England must be
+destroyed!" Cf. _Delenda est Carthago_! "Carthage must be destroyed!"
+_Delenda est Karthago_ is the version of Florus (II, 15) of the words
+used by Cato the Censor, just before the Third Punic War, whenever he
+was called upon to record his vote in the Senate on any subject under
+discussion.
+
+69 27 HYDER ALI (1702-1782), a Mahometan adventurer, made himself
+maharajah of Mysore and gave the English in India serious trouble;
+he was defeated in 1782 by Sir Eyre Coote. Tippoo Sahib, his son and
+successor, proved less dangerous and was finally killed at Seringapatam
+in 1799.
+
+70 4 NATIONALITY IT WAS NOT: i.e. nationalism--patriotism--it was not.
+Cf. _Revolt of the Tartars_, Riverside ed., Vol. XII, p. 4; Masson's
+ed., Vol. VII, p. 370, where De Quincey speaks of the Torgod as "tribes
+whose native ferocity was exasperated by debasing forms of superstition,
+and by a nationality as well as an inflated conceit of their own merit
+absolutely unparalleled." Cf. also footnote, p. 94.
+
+70 4 SUFFREN: the great French admiral who in 1780-1781 inflicted so
+much loss upon the British.
+
+70 10 MAGNANIMOUS JUSTICE OF ENGLISHMEN: As Professor Hart observes, the
+treatment of Joan in _Henry VI_ is hardly magnanimous.
+
+71 29 THAT ODIOUS MAN: Cf. pp. 79-80.
+
+72 12 THREE GREAT SUCCESSIVE BATTLES: Rudolf of Lorraine fell at
+Crecy (1346); Frederick of Lorraine at Agincourt (1415); the battle of
+Nicopolis, which sacrificed the third Lorrainer, took place in 1396.
+
+73 24 CHARLES VI (1368-1422) had killed several men during his first fit
+of insanity. He was for the rest of his life wholly unfit to govern. He
+declared Henry V of England, the conqueror of Agincourt, his successor,
+thus disinheriting the Dauphin, his son.
+
+74 2 THE FAMINES, ETC.: Horrible famines occurred in France and England
+in 1315, 1336, and 1353. Such insurrections as Wat Tyler's, in 1381, are
+probably in De Quincey's mind.
+
+74 6 THE TERMINATION OF THE CRUSADES: The Crusades came to an end
+about 1271. "The ulterior results of the crusades," concludes Cox in
+_Encyclopedia Britannica_, "were the breaking up of the feudal system,
+the abolition of serfdom, the supremacy of a common law over the
+independent jurisdiction of chiefs who claimed the right of private
+wars."
+
+74 7 THE DESTRUCTION OF THE TEMPLARS: This most famous of the military
+orders, founded in the twelfth century for the defense of the Latin
+kingdom of Jerusalem, having grown so powerful as to be greatly feared,
+was suppressed at the beginning of the fourteenth century.
+
+74 7 THE PAPAL INTERDICTS: "De Quincey has probably in mind such an
+interdict as that pronounced in 1200, by Innocent III, against France.
+All ecclesiastical functions were suspended and the land was in
+desolation."--HART. England was put under interdict several times, as in
+1170 (for the murder of Becket) and 1208.
+
+74 8 THE TRAGEDIES CAUSED OR SUFFERED BY THE HOUSE OF ANJOU, AND BY
+THE EMPEROR: "The Emperor is Konradin, the last of the Hohenstaufen,
+beheaded by Charles of Anjou at Naples, 1268. The subsequent cruelties
+of Charles in Sicily caused the popular uprising known as the
+Sicilian Vespers, 1282, in which many thousands of Frenchmen were
+assassinated."--HART.
+
+74 10 THE COLOSSAL FIGURE OF FEUDALISM, ETC.: The English yeomen at
+Crecy, overpowering the mounted knights of France, took from feudalism
+its chief support,--the superiority of the mounted knight to the
+unmounted yeoman. Cf. Green, _History of the English People_, Book IV,
+Chap. II.
+
+74 15 THE ABOMINABLE SPECTACLE OF A DOUBLE POPE: For thirty-eight years
+this paradoxical state of things endured.
+
+75 15 THE ROMAN MARTYROLOGY: a list of the martyrs of the Church,
+arranged according to the order of their festivals, and with accounts of
+their lives and sufferings.
+
+76 4 "ABBEYS THERE WERE," ETC.: Cf. Wordsworth, _Peter Bell_, Part
+Second:
+
+  Temples like those among the Hindoos,
+  And mosques, and spires, and abbey windows,
+  And castles all with ivy green.
+
+76 17 THE VOSGES ... HAVE NEVER ATTRACTED MUCH NOTICE, ETC.: They came
+into like prominence after De Quincey's day in the Franco-Prussian War
+of 1870.
+
+76 31 THOSE MYSTERIOUS FAWNS, ETC.: In some of the romances of the
+Middle Ages, especially those containing Celtic material, a knight,
+while hunting, is led by his pursuit of a white fawn (or a white stag or
+boar) to a _fee_ (i.e. an inhabitant of the "Happy Other-world") or into
+the confines of the "Happy Other-world" itself. Sometimes, as in the
+_Guigemar_ of Marie de France, the knight passes on to a series of
+adventures in consequence of his meeting with the white fawn. I owe this
+note to the kindness of Mr. S. W. Kinney, A.M., of Baltimore.
+
+76 33 THAT ANCIENT STAG: See _Englische Studien,_ Vol. V, p. 16,
+where additions are made to the following account from Hardwicke's
+_Traditions, Superstitions, and Folk-Lore,_ Manchester and London, 1872,
+p. 154:
+
+This chasing of the white doe or the white hart by the spectre huntsman
+has assumed various forms. According to Aristotle a white hart was
+killed by Agathocles, King of Sicily, which a thousand years beforehand
+had been consecrated to Diana by Diomedes. Alexander the Great is said
+by Pliny to have caught a white stag, placed a collar of gold about its
+neck, and afterwards set it free. Succeeding heroes have in after days
+been announced as the capturers of this famous white hart. Julius Caesar
+took the place of Alexander, and Charlemagne caught a white hart at both
+Magdeburg, and in the Holstein woods. In 1172 William [Henry] the Lion
+is reported to have accomplished a similar feat, according to a Latin
+inscription on the walls of Lubeck Cathedral. Tradition says the white
+hart has been caught on Rothwell Hay Common, in Yorkshire, and in
+Windsor Forest.
+
+This reference I owe indirectly to Professor J. M. Manly, of Chicago.
+
+77 4 OR, BEING UPON THE MARCHES OF FRANCE, A MARQUIS: _Marquis_ is
+derived from _march,_ and was originally the title of the guardian of
+the frontier, or march.
+
+77 13 AGREED WITH SIR ROGER DE COVERLEY THAT A GOOD DEAL MIGHT BE SAID
+ON BOTH SIDES: This expression, as has been pointed out to me, is from
+the middle of _Spectator_ No. 122, where Sir Roger, having been appealed
+to on a question of fishing privileges, replied, "with an air of a man
+who would not give his judgment rashly, that much might be said on both
+sides." It is likely, however, that De Quincey may have connected it
+in his mind with the discussion of witchcraft at the beginning of
+_Spectator_ No. 117, where Addison balances the grounds for belief and
+unbelief somewhat as De Quincey does here.
+
+78 7 BERGERETA: a very late Latin form of French _bergerette,_ "a
+shepherdess."
+
+78 15 M. SIMOND, IN HIS "TRAVELS": The reference is to _Journal of a
+Tour and Residence in Great Britain during the years 1810 and 1811,_ by
+Louis Simond, 2d ed. (Edinburgh, 1817), to which is added an appendix on
+France, written in December, 1815, and October, 1816. De Quincey refers
+to this story with horror several times, but such scenes are not yet
+wholly unknown.
+
+79 21 A CHEVALIER OF ST. LOUIS: The French order of St. Louis
+was founded by Louis XIV in 1693 for military service. After its
+discontinuance at the Revolution this order was reinstated in 1814; but
+no knights have been created since 1830. "Chevalier" is the lowest rank
+in such an order; it is here erroneously used by De Quincey as a title
+of address.
+
+79 22 "CHEVALIER, AS-TU DONNE," etc.: "Chevalier, have you fed the hog?"
+"MA FILLE," ETC.: "My daughter, have you," etc. "PUCELLE," ETC.: "Maid
+of Orleans, have you saved the lilies (i.e. France)?"
+
+79 28 IF THE MAN THAT TURNIPS CRIES: Cf. _Johnsoniana_, ed. R. Napier,
+London, 1884, where, in _Anecdotes of Johnson_, by Mrs. Piozzi, p. 29,
+is found: "'T is a mere play of words (added he)"--Johnson is speaking
+of certain "verses by Lopez de Vega"--"and you might as well say, that
+
+  "If the man who turnips cries,
+  Cry not when his father dies,
+  'T is a proof that he had rather
+  Have a turnip than his father."
+
+This reference is given in Bartlett's _Familiar Quotations_.
+
+80 4 THE ORIFLAMME OF FRANCE: the red banner of St. Denis, preserved in
+the abbey of that name, near Paris, and borne before the French king as
+a consecrated flag.
+
+80 22 TWENTY YEARS AFTER, TALKING WITH SOUTHEY: In 1816 De Quincey was
+a resident of Grasmere; Southey lived for many years at Keswick, a
+few miles away; they met first in 1807. For De Quincey's estimate
+of Southey's _Joan of Arc_, see _Works_, Riverside ed., Vol. VI, pp.
+262-266; Masson's ed., Vol. V, pp. 238-242.
+
+80 28 CHINON is a little town near Tours.
+
+81 3 SHE "PRICKS" FOR SHERIFFS: The old custom was to prick with a pin
+the names of those chosen by the sovereign for sheriffs.
+
+82 9 AMPULLA: the flask containing the sacred oil used at coronations.
+
+82 10 THE ENGLISH BOY: Henry VI was nine months old when he was
+proclaimed king of England and France in 1422, Charles VI of France, and
+Henry V, his legal heir, having both died in that year. Henry's mother
+was the eldest daughter of Charles VI.
+
+82 13 DRAWN FROM THE OVENS OF RHEIMS: Rheims, where the kings of France
+were crowned, was famous for its biscuits and gingerbread.
+
+82 26 TINDAL'S "CHRISTIANITY AS OLD AS THE CREATION": Matthew Tindal
+(1657-1732) published this work in 1732; its greatest interest lies in
+the fact that to this book more than to any other Butler's _Analogy_ was
+a reply. Tindal's argument was that natural religion, as taught by the
+deists, was complete; that no revelation was necessary. A life according
+to nature is all that the best religion can teach. Such doctrine as this
+Joan preached in the speech ascribed to her.
+
+82 27 A PARTE ANTE: "from the part gone before"; Joan's speech being
+three centuries earlier than the book from which it was taken.
+
+83 9 THAT DIVINE PASSAGE IN "PARADISE REGAINED": from Book I, II.
+196-205.
+
+84 34 PATAY IS NEAR ORLEANS: Troyes was the capital of the old province
+of Champagne.
+
+86 25 "NOLEBAT," ETC.: "She would not use her sword or kill any one."
+
+87 24 MADE PRISONER BY THE BURGUNDIANS: The English have accused the
+French officers of conniving at Joan's capture through jealousy of her
+successes. Compiegne is fifty miles northeast of Paris.
+
+87 27 BISHOP OF BEAUVAIS: Beauvais is forty-three miles northwest
+of Paris, in Normandy. This bishop, Pierre Cauchon, rector of the
+University at Paris, was devoted to the English party.
+
+87 30 "BISHOP THAT ART," ETC.: Cf. Shakespeare's _Macbeth_, Act I, sc.
+v, 1. 13.
+
+87 33 A TRIPLE CROWN: The papacy is meant, of course. The pope's tiara
+is a tall cap of golden cloth, encircled by three coronets.
+
+88 17 JUDGES EXAMINING THE PRISONER: The judge in France questions a
+prisoner minutely when he is first taken, before he is remanded for
+trial. De Quincey displays here his inveterate prejudice against the
+French; but this practice is widely regarded as the vital error of
+French criminal procedure.,
+
+89 5 A WRETCHED DOMINICAN: a member of the order of mendicant friars
+established in France by Domingo de Guzman in 1216. Their official name
+was Fratres Predicatores, "Preaching Friars," and their chief objects
+were preaching and instruction. Their influence was very great until
+the rise of the Jesuit order in the sixteenth century. The Dominicans
+Le Maitre and Graverent (the Grand Inquisitor) both took part in the
+prosecution.
+
+89 31 FOR A LESS CAUSE THAN MARTYRDOM: Cf. Genesis ii. 24.
+
+91 14 FROM THE FOUR WINDS: There may be a reminiscence here of Ezekiel
+xxxvii. 1-10, especially verse 9: "Come from the four winds, O breath,
+and breathe upon these slain, that they may live."
+
+91 30 LUXOR. See note 13 27.
+
+92 15 DAUGHTER OF CAESARS: She was the daughter of the German emperor,
+Francis I, whose sovereignty, as the name "Holy Roman Empire" shows, was
+supposed to continue that of the ancient Roman emperors.
+
+92 17 CHARLOTTE CORDAY (1768-93) murdered the revolutionist Marat in the
+belief that the good of France required it; two days later she paid the
+penalty, as she had expected, with her life.
+
+93 18 GRAFTON, A CHRONICLER: Richard Grafton died about 1572. He was
+printer to Edward VI. His chronicle was published in 1569.
+
+93 20 "FOULE FACE": _Foule_ formerly meant "ugly."
+
+9321 HOLINSHEAD: Raphael Holinshed died about 1580. His great work,
+_Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland_, was used by Shakespeare
+as the source of several plays. He writes of Joan: "Of favor
+[appearance] was she counted likesome; of person stronglie made, and
+manlie; of courage, great, hardie, and stout withall."
+
+94 (footnote) SATANIC: This epithet was applied to the work of some
+of his contemporaries by Southey in the preface to his _Vision of
+Judgement_, 1821. It has been generally assumed that Byron and Shelley
+are meant. See Introduction to Byron's _Vision of Judgment_ in the new
+Murray edition of Byron, Vol. IV.
+
+96 (footnote) BURGOO: a thick oatmeal gruel or porridge used by seamen.
+According to the _New English Dictionary_ the derivation is unknown; but
+in the _Athenaeum_, Oct. 6, 1888, quoted by Hart, the word is explained
+as a corruption of Arabic _burghul_.
+
+101 30 ENGLISH PRINCE, REGENT OF FRANCE: John, Duke of Bedford, uncle
+of Henry VI. "In genius for war as in political capacity," says J.
+R. Green, "John was hardly inferior to Henry [the Fifth, his brother]
+himself" (_A History of the English People_, Book IV, Chap. VI).
+
+101 31 MY LORD OF WINCHESTER: Henry Beaufort, Bishop of Winchester,
+half-brother of Henry IV. He was the most prominent English prelate of
+his time and was the only Englishman in the Court that condemned
+Joan. As to the story of his death, to which De Quincey alludes, see
+Shakespeare, 2 Henry VI, Act III, sc. in. Beaufort became cardinal in
+1426.
+
+102 17 WHO IS THIS THAT COMETH FROM DOMREMY? This is an evident
+imitation of the famous passage from Isaiah Ixiii. I: "Who is this that
+cometh from Edom, with dyed garments from Bozrah?" "Bloody coronation
+robes" is rather obscure, but probably refers to the fact that Joan had
+shed her own blood to bring about the coronation of her sovereign; she
+is supposed to have appeared in armor at the actual coronation ceremony,
+and this armor might with reason be imagined as "bloody."
+
+102 22 SHE ... SHALL TAKE MY LORD'S BRIEF: that is, she shall act as the
+bishop's counsel. In the case of Beauvais, as in that of Winchester,
+it must be remembered that in all monarchical countries the bishops are
+"lords spiritual," on an equality with the greater secular nobles, the
+"lords temporal."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc, by
+Thomas de Quincey
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