Book_ ^^ Copyright}^" ^505. COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. DE oyiNCEY'S THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH AND JOAN OF ARC Edited With Introduction and Notes BY MILTON HAIGHT TURK, Ph.D. Professor of English in Hobart College GINN & COMPANY boston • NEW YORK • CHICAGO • LONDON OCT. 13 ^^05 ^^^ ^^v. ^^^^ Entered at Stationers' Hall Copyright, 1902, 1905 By MILTON HAIGHT TURK ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 55-9 VCf)t l^ttieneeum 3^vm GINN & COMPANY • PRO- PRIETORS . BOSTON . U.S.A. TO CHARLES DEACON CREE THIS LITTLE VOLUME IS AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED Ghncairn^ Kilmacolm, Scotland June 2y, igos 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 num- ber 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 Page I. Life vii 11. Critical Remarks x III. Bibliographical Note . . . xiv SELECTIONS The English Mail-Coach i Joan of Arc 64 NOTES ' 103 INTRODUCTION I. LIFE Thomas de Quincey was born in Manchester on the 15 th 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 Man- chester. 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 sohtude, 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 viii INTRODtfCTION boy could harangue an Athenian mob better than you or I could address an Enghsh one." He was sent to Manchester Grammar School, however, in order that after three jears' stay he might secure a scholarship at Brasenose College, Oxford. He re- mained there — strongly protesting against a situation which deprived him " of healthy 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 Ches- ter, where his mothisr 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.^ 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. FaiHng 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 1 For a most interesting account of this period see the Confessions of a7t E7iglish Opium-Eater^ Athenseum Press Selections from De Quincey^ pp. 1 65-1 71, and notes. INTRODUCTION ix 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 18 16, and soon after, his patrimony having been exhausted, he took up literary work in earnest. In 182 1 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 accord- ingly 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. . . . Tay- lor 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 Shake- speare's sonnets, Spenser's minor poems, and the great writers and characters of Elizabeth's age and those of Cn^mwell's time." From this time on De Quincey maintained himself by con- tributing to various magazines. He soon exchanged London and the Lakes for Edinburgh and its suburb, Lasswade, where X INTRODUCTION the remainder of his Hfe was spent. Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine and its rival Taifs Magazine received a large num- ber of contributions. The English Mail- Coach appeared in 1849 in Blackwood, Joan of Arc had already been published (1847) in Tail, De Quincey continued to drink laudanum throughout his life, — twice after 182 1 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 incon- siderate in his behavior. Again, he sets up a high standard of purity of diction, yet uses slang quite unnecessarily and inap- propriately ; 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 them- selves purely to the understanding as an insulated faculty, or do so primarily." These essays would include, according to Professor Masson's subdivision, (^) Biographies, such as Shake- speare or Pope — Joan of Arc falls here, yet has some claim to a place in the first class ; (J?) Historical essays, like The Ccesars; (c) Speculative and Theological essays ; {d) Essays in INTRODUCTION xi 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, **0n these," he says, " as modes of impassioned prose ranging un- der no precedents that I am aware of in 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 sub- jects, 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 oppor- tunities to observe these famous men and women, and he pos- sessed no little insight into literature and personaHty. As to the Autobiographic Sketches, the handhng of events is hope- lessly arbitrary and fragmentary. In truth, De Quincey is draw- ing 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 Autobiogra- phy, while its poetical passages range it with the Suspiria and Xli INTRODUCTION the Mail- Coach, De Quincey seems to have believed that he was creating in such writings a new Hterary 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 seven- teenth-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 con- temporaries wrote as he did ; evidently De Quincey has a dis- tinct 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.^ It is not without significance that he men- tions as especially attractive to the young only writings with a large narrative element.^ Few boys read poetry, whether in verse or prose, and fewer still criticism or philosophy ; to every normal boy the gate of good Hterature 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 saHent quali- ties in good writing appeal to inexperienced readers. I believe, 1 " Probably more boys have in the last forty years been brought to a love of literature proper by De Quincey than by any other writer whatever." — History of Nuiete e nth- Century Literature^ p. 198. 2 " To read the Essay on Murder^ the Eitglish Mail-Coach, The Spanish Nun, The Ccesars, and half a score other things at, the age of about fifteen or sixteen is, or ought to be, to fall in love v^rith them." — Essays in English Literature, 1^80-1860, p. 307. INTRODUCTION xiii 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 e,xtend 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 enthusi- asm 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 dra- matic 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 is n't whisky with him, it's opium; if it isn't opium, it's whisky." This speech estabHshes 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 falla- cies 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 neu- ralgic patient, into the terrible grasp of opium, who realizes. xiv INTRODUCTION 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 nar- rator; 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 *lthere 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 dis- course 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 quahty, — an achievement that must be in no small measure the solid basis of De Quincey's fame. IIL BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE I. Works 1. The Collected Writings of Thomas de Quincey. New and enlarged edition by David Masson. Edinburgh : A. and C. Black, 1 889-1 890. [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.] INTRODUCTION XV 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 pub- lished. . . . The selections are The Affliction of Child- hood^ 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^ foan of Arc, and On the Knocking at the Gate in ' Macbeth.' "] II. Biography and Criticism 4. D. Masson. Thojnas De Quittcey, English Men of Letters. London. [New York : Harper. An excellent brief biog- raphy. 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 Communicatio7ts from Coleridge, the Wordsworths, Hannah More, Professor Wilson, and others. 2 vols. London : W. Heinemann, 1 891. 8. J. Hogg.. De Quincey and his Friends, Personal Recollec- tions, 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. xvi INTRODUCTION 9. E. T. Mason. Personal Traits of British Authors. New York, 1885. [4 vols. The volume subtitled Scott^ ^ogg^ 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 Quin- cey'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, 5 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,^ discover) the satellites of Jupiter, those very next things extant to mail-coaches in the two capital pretensions of speed and 10 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 subse- 15 quent dreams: an agency which they accomplished, ist, 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 soli- tary roads ; 3dly, through animal beauty and power so often 20 displayed in the class of horses selected for this mail service ; 1 ** The same thing " ; — Thus, in the calendar of the Church Festi- vals, 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. I 2 SELECTIONS FROM DE QUINCE Y 4thly, through the conscious presence of a central intellect, that, in the midst of vast distances ^ — of storms, of darkness, of danger — overruled all obstacles into one steady co-opera- tion to a national result. For my own feeling, this post-office 5 service spoke as by some mighty orchestra, where a thousand instruments, all disregarding each other, and so far in dan- ger 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 organ- ic isation. 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 2,^i\A political mission which at that time it fulfilled. 15 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 20 had been sown. Neither was the meanest peasant so much below the grandeur and the sorrow of the times as to con- found 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 25 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 30 enemy, and to the nations of all western or central Europe, 1 " 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 con- stantly at a particular bridge which bisected the total distance. THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 3 through whose pusillanimity it was that the French domina- tion 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 5 heart ; and naturally, in the Oxford of that day, all hearts were impassioned, as being all (or nearly all) in early man- hood. 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, 10 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 Michael- mas, Lent, Easter, and Act, were kept by a residence, in the aggregate, of ninety-one days, or thirteen weeks. Under 15 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 20 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 25 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- 30 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 4 SELECTIONS FROM DE QUINCE Y 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 5 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 10 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 ^<^^ happened, where all three outsides (the trinity of Pariahs) made a vain attempt to sit 15 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 20 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. 25 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- d-manger, sang out, *^This way, my good men," and then 30 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 THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH S 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 5 ignored by the porcelain men, under the maxim that objects not appearing and objects not existing are governed by the same logical construction.^ Such being, at that time, the usage of mail-coaches, what was to be done by us of young Oxford ? We, the most 10 aristocratic of people, who were addicted to the practice of looking down superciliously even upon the insides them- selves 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 15 being " raff '' (the name at that period for "snobs " ^), 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 20 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 pre- tended that the inferior situations have any separate 25 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 1 De non apparentibus^ etc. 2 " SnobSf''^ and its antithesis, " nobs^'' arose among the internal fac- tions 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. 6 SELECTIONS FROM DE QUINCE Y people, the sole benefit is in the price. Now, on the con- trary, 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 5 connected with the condition of riding inside ; which con- dition 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 10 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 apart- ments about the mail. We conducted this inquiry on meta- 15 physical 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 20 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 25 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 expla- 30 nations upon this point ; but, as His Excellency communi- cated these in a diplomatic whisper at the very moment of his departure, the celestial intellect was very feebly illu- minated, and it became necessary to call a cabinet council on the grand state question, "Where was the Emperor to THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 7 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, 5 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 10 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 /to sit i* " But the privy council, incensed 15 by his disloyalty, unanimously opened the door, and kicked him into the inside. He had all the inside places to him- self ; 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, 20 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 — ^^r^how." Finally this contumacious coach- man lengthened the check-strings into a sort of jury-reins 25 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 30 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. 8 SELECTIONS FROM DE QUINCE Y 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, fa ira. In fact, it soon became too 5 popular. The "public" — a well-known character, particu- larly disagreeable, though slightly respectable, and noto- rious for affecting the chief seats in synagogues — had at first loudly opposed this revolution ; but, when the oppo- sition showed itself to be ineffectual, our disagreeable lo 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., 15 who hired out their persons as warming-pans on the box seat. That, you know, was shocking to all moral sensibili- ties. 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. 20 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 cor- poration was constantly bribed, rebribed, and often sur- 25 rebribed ; 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 30 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 THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 9 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, **0h no; I'll tell you what to do. Take lodgings for the next forty days 5 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., 10 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. 15 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 20 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 Troll's Iceland^ ; except, indeed, now and then a parliamentary rat, who 25 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 30 1 '< Von TroiVs 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 are no snakes in Icelafid,^^ lo SELECTIONS FROM DE QUINCE Y against his offence, insisted on taking up a forbidden seat ^ 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 5 Icesa 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 10 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 VirgiPs 15 "^neid " really too hackneyed — "Jam proximus ardet Ucalegon." 1 ''''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 advan- tages — 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 oifour 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. THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 1 1 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 5 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. 10 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 15 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 turn- pike gates : with what deferential hurry, with what an obedient start, they fly open at our approach ! Look at 20 that long line of carts and carters ahead, audaciously usurp- ing 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' 25 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 30 headsman and his axe, the block and the sawdust, to close up the vista of his horrors. What ! shall it be within bene- fit of clergy to delay the king's message on the high road ? — to interrupt the great respirations, ebb and flood, systole 12 SELECTIONS FROM DE QUINCE Y 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 5 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 10 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 sanc- tion, or upon conscious power that haughtily dispensed with that sanction, equally it spoke from a potential station ; 15 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 20 cart loaded with eggs, &c. Huge was the affliction and dismay, awful was the smash. I, as far as possible, endeav- oured 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 25 stretch forth my hands in sorrow, saying (in words too celebrated at that time, from the false echoes ^ of Marengo), "Ah! wherefore have we not time to weep over you?" — which was evidently impossible, since, in fact, we had not 1 ^^ 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 Cam- bronne at Waterloo, " La Garde meurt, mais ne se rend pas," or as the repartees of Talleyrand. THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 13 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 con- dolence ? Could it be expected to provide tears for the accidents of the road ? If even it seemed to trample on s 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 utter- most its privilege of imperial precedency, and astonished 10 weak minds by the feudal powers which I hinted to be lurking constructively in the charters of this proud estab- lishment. Once I remember being on the box of the Holyhead mail, between Shrewsbury and Oswestry, when a tawdry thing from Birmingham, some "Tallyho" or 15 *' 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 1 The single ornament on our dark ground of chocolate colour was the mighty shield of the imperial arms, but emblazoned in pro- 20 portions 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 25 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 30 the horses announced a desperate intention of leaving us behind. "Do you see thatV^ 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 14 SELECTIONS FROM DE QUINCE Y 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 5 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 lo 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 15 their presumption; whilst our guard blew back a shatter- ing 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 20 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 Welsh- 25 man 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 30 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 THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 15 chief omrahs, were flying their falcons, a hawk suddenly flew at a majestic eagle, and, in defiance of the eagle's nat- ural 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 5 spot. Amazement seized the sultan at the unequal contest, and burning admiration for its unparalleled result. He com- manded 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 10 of gold and rubies should be solemnly placed on the hawk's head, but then that, immediately after this solemn coro- nation, 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 15 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, 20 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 prece- dency of coaches, as being probably the statute relied 25 on for the capital punishment of such offences, he replied drily that, if the attempt to pass a mail really were treason- able, it was a pity that the " Tallyho " appeared to have so imperfect an acquaintance with law. The modern modes of travelling cannot compare with 30 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 1 6 SELECTIONS FROM DE QUINCE Y 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, 5 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 lo 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 insen- 15 sate agencies, that had no sympathy to give, but was incar- nated 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 20 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 propa- 25 gating 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 discon- nected man's heart from the ministers of his locomotion. Nile nor Trafalgar has power to raise an extra bubble in a 30 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 THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 17 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 hence- forwards travel by culinary process ; and the trumpet that once announced from afar the laurelled mail, heart-shaking 5 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 10 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 15 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 20 Marlborough forest, couldst thou, sweet Fanny of the Bath road, have become the glorified inmate of my dreams t Yet Fanny, as the loveliest young woman for face and per- son that perhaps in my whole life I have beheld, merited the station which even now, from a distance of forty years, 25 she holds in my dreams ; yes, though by links of natural association she brings along with her a troop of dread- ful creatures, fabulous and not fabulous, that are more abominable to the heart than Fanny and the dawn are delightful. 30 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 1 8 SELECTIONS FROM BE QUINCE Y 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 cen- 5 tral rendezvous for converging them. The mail-coachman who drove the Bath mail and wore the royal livery^ hap- pened 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 lo 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 15 me) counted in her train a hundred and ninety-nine pro- fessed 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 under- 20 taken 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. 25 Did I then make love to Fanny ? Why, yes ; about as lu Worg the royal livery''''-: — The general impression was that the royal livery belonged of right to the mail-coachmen as their profes- sional 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. THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 19 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 5 woman's ear a great deal of truth, and (by way of paren- thesis) some trifle of falsehood. Grandpapa did right, there- fore, to watch me. And yet, as happens too often to the grandpapas of earth in a contest with the admirers of grand- daughters, how vainly would he have watched me had I 10 meditated any evil whispers to Fanny ! She, it is my belief, would have protected herself against any man's evil sug- gestions. 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? 15 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 20 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 croco- dile. This lay in a monstrous inaptitude for turning round. 25 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 croco- dile infirmity of his I planted a human advantage for ten- 30 dering my homage to Miss Fanny. In defiance of all his honourable vigilance, no sooner had he presented to us his 20 SELECTIONS FROM DE QUINCE Y mighty Jovian back (what a field for displaying to man- kind his royal scarlet !), whilst inspecting professionally the buckles, the straps, and the silvery turrets ^ of his har- ness, than I raised Miss Fanny's hand to my lips, and, by 5 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. lo or 12 : in which case a few casualties amongst her lovers (and, observe, they hanged liberally in those days) might have promoted me speedily 10 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 + i. Most truly I loved this beautiful and ingenuous girl; and, had it not 15 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 20 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 25 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 1" 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. THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 21 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 5 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 10 society, this accounts for a singular mistake that prevailed through innumerable generations on the Nile. The croco- dile 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: 15 he viewed the crocodile as a thing sometimes to worship, but always to run away from. And this continued till Mr. Waterton^ 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 20 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 1 " Mr. Waterton " ; — Had the reader lived through the last gener- ation, 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 td 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. 2 2 SELECTIONS FROM DE QUINCE Y 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 5 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 lo 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 15 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 para- dise. Then comes a venerable crocodile, in a royal livery of scarlet and gold, with sixteen capes ; and the crocodile 20 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^ of the 25 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, 1 " 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, con- ciliates 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. THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 23 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, 5 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 sculp- tured the eternal writing which proclaims the frailty of 10 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 15 Waterloo; the second and third years of which period (1806 and 1807) were comparatively sterile; but the other nine (from 1805 to 18 15 inclusively) furnished a long suc- cession of victories, the least of which, in such a contest of Titans, had an inappreciable value of position : partly for 20 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 con- tinual blockades, to insult them by capturing if it were but 25 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 procla- mation have spoken in the audacity^ of having bearded the 30 "^^^ Audacity'''' : — Such the French accounted it; and it has struck me that Soult would not have been so popular in London, at the period 2 4 SELECTIONS FROM DE QUINCE Y 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 5 is to be noted that, from our insular situation, and the mul- titude 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 10 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, ^ and not in St. Martin's-le-Grand, was seated the General Post-OfBce. In w^hat exact strength we mus- 15 tered I do not remember ; but, from the length of each sep- arate attclage^ 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 20 strength, their brilliant cleanliness, their beautiful sim- plicity — but, more than all, the royal magnificence of the horses — were what might first have fixed the attention. 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 eit 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. 1 " At that time " ; — I speak of the era previous to Waterloo. THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 25 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 5 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 dis- play what a heart-shaking addition ! — horses, men, car- riages, all are dressed in laurels and flowers, oak-leaves and 10 ribbons. The guards, as being officially his Majesty's ser- vants, 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 15 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 20 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. 25 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 sym- pathy with these fervent feelings by continual hurrahs. Every moment are shouted aloud by the post-office ser- 30 vants, and summoned to draw up, the great ancestral names of cities known to history through a thousand years — Lincoln, Winchester, Portsmouth, Gloucester, Oxford, Bris- tol, Manchester, York, Newcastle, Edinburgh, Glasgow, 2 6 SELECTIONS FROM DE QUINCE Y 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 sep- arate missions. Every moment you hear the thunder of 5 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 t What stir ! — 10 what sea-like ferment! — what a thundering of wheels! — what a trampling of hoofs ! — what a sounding of trumpets I — 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 15 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 burn- 20 ing 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^ miles 1" Three hundred'''' : — Of necessity, this scale of measurement, to an American, if he happens to be a thoughtless man, must sound ludi- crous. 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 THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 27 — 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. 5 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 even- ing, the sun, perhaps, only just at the point of setting, we 10 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 15 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 conti- nent, 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 magnifi- cent 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.'* 28 SELECTIONS FROM DE QUINC^Y 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, 5 through infinite London, look down or look up with loving eyes upon our gay ribbons and our martial laurels ; some- times 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 lo 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 w^eather being so warm, the glasses are all down ; and one may read, as on the stage of a theatre, everything that goes on within. 15 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 unpre- meditated pantomime, explaining to us every syllable that passes, in these ingenuous girls ! By the sudden start 20 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 ! 25 there has been a great battle in Spain ; and it has been a great victory." In a moment we are on the point of pass- ing 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 30 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 THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 29 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, 5 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 10 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 15 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 20 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, 25 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 diffi- 30 cult to hit a flying mark when embarrassed by the coach- man'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 30 SELECTIONS FROM DE QUINCEY 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 5 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 10 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 15 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 20 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 25 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 ^ ; whilst all around ourselves, that formed a centre of light, the darkness 30 gathered on the rear and flanks in massy blackness : these optical splendours, together with the prodigious enthusiasm 1 " Glittering laurels " ; — I must observe that the colour of green suffers almost a spiritual change and exaltation under the effect of Bengal lights. THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 31 of the people, composed a picture at once scenical and affect- ing, 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 5 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 10 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 15 Peninsular army. Oh yes ; her only son was there. In what regiment t 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 men- tion without raising his hat to their memory, had made the 20 most memorable and effective charge recorded in military annals. They leaped their horses — over a trench where ; they could ; mto it, and with the result of death or muti- lation, when they could not. What proportion cleared the trench is nowhere stated. Those who did closed up and 25 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 fol- lowed. As regarded the enemy, this 23d Dragoons, not, I 30 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 32 SELECTIONS FROM DE QUINCE Y 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 5 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 lo 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 15 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 sleep- ing. I lifted not the overshadowing laurels from the bloody trench in which horse and rider lay mangled together. But 20 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 25 lives for thee, O m.other 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 30 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, THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH :i^'7^ within the last twelve hours, the foremost topic of conver- sation 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 5 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 10 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 (cosnd)^ on the very evening before his assassination, when the minutes of his earthly career were numbered, being 15 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 20 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 calam- 25 ities ; 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 30 may be right in its estimate of sudden death ; and it is a 34 SELECTIONS FROM DE QUINCE Y 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. 5 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 lo a doctrine built upon the eternities of the Christian sys- tem 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 ivhich else may wander, and has wandered, into 15 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 Jinal ^rds or acts. If a man dies, for instance, by some sudd& death 20 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 acci- 25 dent, 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 acci- dent, but one of his habitual transgressions, will it be the more habitual or the more a transgression because some 30 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 intem- perance — a feature of presumption and irreverence, as in THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 35 one that, having known himself drawing near to the pres- ence 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 s 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 lo and Christian views of the moral temper appropriate to death ; but perhaps they are contemplating different cases. Both contemplate a violent death, a Bta^ai/aros — death that is yStato?, or, in other words, death that is brought about, not by internal and spontaneous change, but by 15 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 unlingeringy whereas the Christian Litany by *^sudden death *' means a death without warnings 20 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 pity- ing comrades dies by a most sudden death in Caesar's sense ; one shock, one mighty spasm, one (possibly not one) groan, 25 and all is over. But, in the sense of the Litany, the muti- neer'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 30 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 36 SELECTIONS FROM DE QUINCEY 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 5 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 lo doubt can arise, that of all martyrdoms it is the most agi- tating — 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 15 an evasion can be accomplished. Even that^ even the sick- ening 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- 20 preservation, but to the conscience, on behalf of some other life besides your own, accidentally thrown upon your pro- tection. 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 25 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 30 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 THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 37 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 5 that men generally are summoned to face such awful trials. But potentially, and in shadowy outline, such a trial is mov- ing 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 10 childhood, of meeting a lion, and, through languishing pros- tration 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 15 that dream ; perhaps, as by some sorrowful doom of man, that dream repeats for every one of us, through every gen- eration, 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 20 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 25 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 him- self the original transgression. In dreams, perhaps under 30 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. ;^S SELECT/OATS FROM DE QUINCE Y 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 spec- 5 tator, when seated on the box of the Manchester and Glas- gow 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 10 lateral communications with many rural post-offices were so arranged, either through necessity or through defect of sys- tem, as to make it requisite for the main north-western mail (/.^., the down mail) on reaching Manchester to halt for a number of hours; how many, I do not remember; six or IS 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 20 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 oppor- tunities for asking the road, I lost my way, and did not reach the post-office until it was considerably past mid- 25 night; 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 evi- dence that my chance was not yet lost. Past the time it was; but, by some rare accident, the mail was not even 30 yet ready to start. I ascended to my seat on the box, where my cloak was still lying as it had lain at the Bridge- water 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 THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 39 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 5 shafts to the centre of the earth below it; so that all people found after this warning either aloft in upper cham- bers 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 decap- 10 itated, 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 15 deeds of darkness, gas being a great ally of morality ; but it so happened that on this night there was no other out- side 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 20 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 25 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." 30 He answered to the conditions in every one of the items: — I, a monster he was ; 2, dreadful ; 3, shapeless ; 4, huge; 5, who had lost an eye. But why should that delight me ? 40 SELECTIONS FROM DE QUINCE Y Had he been one of the Calendars in the ** Arabian Nights," and had paid down his eye as the price of his criminal curi- osity, what right had / to exult in his misfortune ? I did not exult ; I delighted in no man's punishment, though it 5 were even merited. But these personal distinctions (Nos. i, 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 10 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 15 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 20 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 25 here ? Had the medical men recommended northern air, or how ? I collected, from such explanations as he volun- teered, 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 con- 30 necting 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 THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 41 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 5 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 10 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 15 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 i^ (if we can) at the rate of one mile extra per hour. Off we are at 20 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 25 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 30 place it is that the separate roads from Liverpool and from Manchester to the north become confluent.^ Within these "^^^ Conjluenf^ : — Suppose a capital Y (the Pythagorean letter); Lancaster is at the foot of this letter; Liverpool at the top of the 42 SELECTIONS FROM DE QUINCE Y first three stages lay the foundation, the progress, and termi- nation 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 5 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 noth- ing. "Oh, Cyclops!" I exclaimed, " thou art mortal. My friend, thou snorest." Through the first eleven miles, how- 10 ever, 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 IS reminded me, were now going on at Lancaster: in conse- quence 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 2o 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 25 much more alarming ; since now, after several days' resist- ance 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 sur- rendered himself finally and without a struggle to his right branch; Manchester at the top oi the /e/t; 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 I THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 43 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 5 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 10 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 15 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, i, a conflict with powerful established interests, 2, a large sys- tem of new arrangements, and 3, a new parliamentary 20 statute. But as yet this change was merely in contem- plation. As things were at present, twice in the year^ so vast a body of business rolled northwards from the south- ern quarter of the county that for a fortnight at least it occupied the severe exertions of two judges in its despatch. 25 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 hap- pened that, through utter exhaustion amongst men and 30 horses, the road sank into profound silence. Except the 1** 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. 44 SELECTIONS FROM DE QUINCE Y 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 5 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 10 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 b'irthday — a festival to every thoughtful man suggesting solemn and often sigh-born^ thoughts. The county was my own native county — 15 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 master- ing the bodies only of men, as of slaves, or criminals in mines, but working through the fiery will. Upon no equal 20 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 25 up and down, and regularly subsiding back into silence about sunset, could not fail (when united with this perma- nent 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 30 sorrow, towards which, as to their secret haven, the pro- founder aspirations of man's heart are in solitude continually ^ " Sigh-born " ; — I owe the suggestion of this word to an obscure remembrance of a beautiful phrase in " Giraldus Cambrensis " — viz., suspiriosce cogitationes. THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 45 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 trem- 5 blings 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, 10 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 15 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 con- 20 fidence 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 25 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 30 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. 46 SELECTIONS FROM DE QUINCEY On the contrary, my fear is that I am miserably and shame- fully 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 5 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 10 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, 15 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 our- 20 selves. 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 25 had drawn tis 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 30 law, the crossing over to the other would, of course, be looked for from us} Our lamps, still lighted, would give 1 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 THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 47 the impression of vigilance on our part. And every crea- ture that met us would rely upon 21s for quartering.^ 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 5 intuition. Under this steady though rapid anticipation of the evil which Diight 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 10 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 15 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. 20 Easy was it ? See, then, that bronze equestrian statue. The cruel rider has kept the bit in his horse's mouth for two cen- turies. 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 25 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 ? only increased the danger, as being a regulation very imperfectly made known, very unequally enforced, and therefore often embarrassing the movements on both sides. 1 ** Quartering'''' : — This is the technical word, and, I presume, derived from the French cartayery to evade a rut or any obstacle. 48 SELECTIONS FROM DE QUINCE Y 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 5 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 lo 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 danger- ous attempt to one cramped by nearly three hundred miles of outside travelling. And, fortunately, before I had lost 15 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 catas- trophe sealed. All was apparently finished. The court was sitting ; the case was heard ; the judge had finished ; and 20 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 over- head, gave to it the character of a cathedral aisle. These 25 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 30 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, THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 49 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 1 Strange it is, and to a mere auditor of the 5 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 10 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. 15 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 20 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 25 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 ? 30 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, so SELECTIONS FROM DE QUINCEY 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. 5 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 10 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 15 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 20 solitude with God, and to seek his counsel from Him I 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 25 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 30 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 equi- page 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 THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 51 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, 5 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 10 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 fore- feet upon the crown or arching centre of the road. The 15 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 — 20 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 25 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 30 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 whisper- ing, "Father, which art in heaven, do Thou finish above 52 SELECTIONS FROM DE QUINCE Y 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 5 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 pas- 10 sage, 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. IS 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 tor- 20 sion 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 shiver- ings. The young man trembled not, nor shivered. He sat like a rock. But his was the steadiness of agitation frozen 25 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 30 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 THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH S3 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 5 — 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. 10 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 15 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 20 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^ ! — rapture 25 1 '■'' Averted sig7ts^^ : — 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. 54 SELECTIONS FROM DE QUINCE Y 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 5 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 lo on the wings of the wind ! Epilepsy so brief of horror, wherefore is it that thou canst not die ? Passing so sud- denly into darkness, wherefore is it that still thou shed- dest thy sad funeral blights upon the gorgeous mosaics of dreams ? Fragment of music too passionate, heard once, 15 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 ? Lo, it is summer — almighty summer ! The everlasting gates of life and summer are thrown open wide ; and on the 20 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 25 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 30 the pinnace moved ! And upon her deck what a bevy of human flowers : young women how lovely, young men how THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 55 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 5 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 overtasking her ? Did ruin to our friends couch within 10 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 15 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 ^\\h. theniV^ Answer there was none. But suddenly the man at the 20 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 gather- 25 ing 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 30 they woo their ruin ? " But in a moment, as she was close 56 SELECTIONS FROM DE QUINCE Y upon us, some impulse of a heady current or local vortex gave a wheeling bias to her course, and off she forged with- out a shock. As she ran past us, high aloft amongst the shrouds stood the lady of the pinnace. The deeps opened 5 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 madden- 10 ing 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 tack- ling — rising, sinking, fluttering, trembling, praying; there 15 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, 20 but when I knew not, nor how, III Sweet funeral bells from some incalculable distance, wail- ing 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 25 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 extrem- ity of haste. Her running was the running of panic ; and often she looked back as to some dreadful enemy in the 30 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 THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 57 from another peril, and vainly I shouted to her of quick- sands 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 5 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 10 her head and her treacherous grave, tossing, faltering, ris- ing, 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 15 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. 20 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 25 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 — 30 "or else, oh heavens! it is victory that is final, victory that swallows up all strife. '' 58 SELECTIONS FROM DE QUINCE Y 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 5 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 10 than by tears, by restless anthems, and Te Deums reverber- ated from the choirs and orchestras of earth. These tid- ings 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 15 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 20 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 25 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. 30 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 ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 59 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 sick- ening, kindled anew in sympathy with the secret word that was flying past. Forty leagues we might have run in the 5 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 10 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." 15 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 ^ of the cathedral graves — suddenly we became aware of a vast necropolis 20 rising upon the far-off horizon — a city of sepulchres, built within the saintly cathedral for the warrior dead that 1 " 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 sanc- tity 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 cathe- dral, 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. ^ 6o SELECTIONS FROM DE QUINCE Y 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, 5 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 lo with haughty intrusion, that ran back with mighty shad- ows 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 15 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 20 round headlands, like hurricanes that ride into the secrets of forests, faster than ever light unwove the mazes of dark- ness, 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 25 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 illim- itable central aisle, when coming up this aisle to meet us we beheld afar off a female child, that rode in a carriage 30 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 THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 6i 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 5 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 10 — 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 groan- 15 ing 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 20 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 25 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 30 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 62 SELECTIONS FROM DE QUINCE Y 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 5 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 lo 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 counte- 15 nance from his wings, I saw, by the glory in his eye, that from Heaven he had won at last. Then was completed the passion of the mighty fugue. The golden tubes of the organ, which as yet had but mut- tered at intervals — gleaming amongst clouds and surges 20 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; trum- 25 pet 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 30 the burials of centuries, rose again to the voice of perfect joy, did ye indeed mingle with the festivals of Death ? Lo ! THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 63 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 5 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 10 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 15 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 20 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 25 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^ What is to be thought of her! What is to be thought of the poor shepherd girl from the hills and forests of Lor- raine, that — like the Hebrew shepherd boy from the hills and forests of Judea — rose suddenly out of the quiet, out 5 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 lo the girl of Lorraine, if we read her story as it was read by those who saw her nearest. Adverse armies bore witness 1 " 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 Dare. 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 defer- entially, 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 disturb- ing the old received spelling is that Jean Hordal, a descendant of La Pucelle's brother, spelled the name Dare 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. 64 JOAN OF ARC 65 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 5 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 10 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 15 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 20 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.^ Daughter of Domremy, when the gratitude of thy king shall awaken, thou wilt be sleeping the sleep of the dead. Call her, King 25 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 uni- versal France, as even yet may happen, shall proclaim the grandeur of the poor shepherd girl that gave up all for her 30 country, thy ear, young shepherd girl, will have been deaf for five centuries. To suffer and to do, that was thy 1" Those that share thy blood ^\' — A collateral relative of Joanna's was subsequently ennobled by the title of Du Lys. 66 SELECTIONS FROM BE QUINCE Y 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 5 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 her- self, relax from her belief in the darkness that was travel- lo ling 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 15 around, the pitying eye that lurked but here and there, until nature and imperishable truth broke loose from arti- ficial 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. 20 Great was the throne of France even in those days, and great was He that sat upon it ; but well Joanna knew that riot 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 25 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 30 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 sub- ject of Joanna precisely in the spring of 1847 .? Might it JOAN OF ARC 67 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 5 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 10 pampas, and running races of defiance with snipes, or with the winds, or with their own shadows, if they can find noth- ing 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 15 you beforehand that they are often profound, and at inter- vals 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 dis- 20 advantageously. 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 25 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 30 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 SS SELECTIONS FROM BE QUINCE Y 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 5 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 10 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 15 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 acknowl- 20 edge 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 25 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 30 persecution and bitter death, of her struggle with false witnesses and with ensnaring judges, it would be neces- sary to have before us all the documents, and therefore JOAN OF ARC 69 the collection only now forthcoming in Paris.^ 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, 5 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 per- 10 plexities — 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 15 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 Eng- lish have ever shown the same homage to stubborn enmity. To work unflinchingly for the ruin of England; 20 to say through life, by word and by deed, Delenda est Anglia Vidrix ! — 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 25 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 30 solitary instance, of praising an enemy (what do you say "^^^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. 70 SELECTIONS FROM DE QUINCE Y 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 5 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 com- lo memoration 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^) D'Arc was born at Domremy, a village on the marches of Lorraine and Champagne, and dependent upon 15 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 20 champagne of London is chiefly grown in Devonshire; La Pucelle, because the champagne of Champagne never, by any i^y^^w"; — M. Michelet asserts that there was a mystical meaning at that era in calling a child /ean ; 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. JOAN OF ARC 71 chance, flowed into the fountain of Domremy, from which only she drank. M. Michelet will have her to be a Cham- penoise^ 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. 5 Domremy stood upon the frontiers, and, like other fron- tiers, 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 10 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 15 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, 20 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,^ and haunted for ever by wars or rumours of wars, decussated (for anything I know to 25 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 30 Joanna, the same love to France would have been nurtured. 1 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, 72 SELECTIONS FROM DE QUINCE Y 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 5 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 lo Lorraine insisting on having his own throat cut in sup- port 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. 15 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, 20 as one may call the great frontier provinces, were of all localities the most devoted to the Fleurs de Lys. To wit- ness, 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 25 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 30 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 min- istrations of sense. The eye that watched for the gleams JOAN OF ARC 73 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 5 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 hiirtliitg with the obscure sound ; 10 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 over- throws for the chivalry of France, had, before Agincourt 15 occurred, been tranquilised by more than half a century ; hut 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 20 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 25 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 un- known, gloomy, and perhaps maniacal himself, coming out of a forest at noonday, laying his hand upon the bridle of 30 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 74 SELECTIONS FROM DE QUINCE Y 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 ; 5 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 10 permanent significance. But, since then, the colossal fig- ure of feudalism was seen standing, as it were on tiptoe, at Crecy, for flight from earth : that was a revolution unparal- leled ; yet that was a trifle by comparison with the more fearful revolutions that were mining below the Church. By 15 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 20 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 7tew morning in advance. But the whole vast range 25 alike of sweeping glooms overhead dwelt upon all medi- tative 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 30 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 JOAN OF ARC 75 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 5 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 10 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 noth- ing, for she could not read ; but she had heard others read parts of the Roman martyrology. She wept in sympathy 15 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 spirit- ual advantages, she owed most to the advantages of her 20 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 25 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 30 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 satis- factory consequence, how thinly sown with men and women 76 SELECTIONS FROM DE QUINCE Y 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 5 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, 10 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 wil- derness. This sort of religious talisman being secured, a 15 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 18 13-14 for a few brief 20 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 25 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. 30 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, JOAN OF ARC 77 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 5 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, 10 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. 15 Such traditions, or any others that (like the stag) con- nect 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 accord- ing to circumstances, leaves a colouring of sanctity over 20 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 25 — 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 30 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 78 SELECTIONS FROM DE QUINCE Y 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 5 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 tak- lo ing 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 15 to be right. A Frenchman, about forty years ago — M. Simond, in his ** Travels '' — mentions accidentally the fol- lowing 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 20 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, cer- 25 tainly 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 30 domestic ; because, if once owning herself a praedial ser- vant, she would be sensible that this confession extended by probability in the hearer's thoughts to the having in- curred indignities of this horrible kind. Haumette clearly thinks it more dignified for Joanna to have been darning JOAN OF ARC 79 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 dan- ger of that : Joanna never was in service ; and my opinion is that her father should have mended his own stockings, 5 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 10 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 ? 15 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 20 overheard saying to his son, a Chevalier of St. Louis, " Chevalier^ as-tu dotifie 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 Jille, as-tu donne aic cochon a manger V^ to saying, ^^ Pucelle 2^ d'' Orlkans^ as-tu sauve les fleurs-de-lysV 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 30 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 8o SELECTIONS FROM DE QUINCE Y 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 5 France. It is probable (as M. Michelet suggests) that the title of Virgin or Pucelle had in itself, and apart from the miracu- lous stories about her, a secret power over the rude soldiery and partisan chiefs of that period ; for in such a person 10 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 15 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 20 arranged ; nor can surrender myself to the conjurer's leger- demain, 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 25 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 30 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 glitter- ing crowd that on different motives yearned for her success, but she would ruin .herself, and, as the oracle within had JOAN OF ARC gi 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 dif- ference : our own Lady pricks for two men out of three ; 5 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, 10 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 vis- ions she had seen those that were more so), but because 15 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 20 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.'' 25 This usurper is even crowned : '^ the jeweled crown shines on a menial's head.'' But, really, that is ''^ un pen 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 dau- 30 phin could not lend more than belonged to him. Accord- ing to the popular notion, he had no crown for himself; consequently none to lend, on any pretence whatever, until 82 SELECTIONS FROM DE QUINCE Y 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 5 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 10 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. 15 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.'' 20 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 25 V. 354-391, bk. iii. It is a double impossibility: ist, because a piracy from Tindal's " Christianity as old as the Creation " — a piracy^ 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 30 doctors, among other secrets, that she never in her life attended — ist. Mass; nor 2d, the Sacramental Table; nor 3d, Confession. In the meantime, all this deistical con- fession of Joanna's, besides being suicidal for the interest of her cause, is opposed to the depositions upon both trials. JOAN OF ARC 83 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 5 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 10 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 15 What from within I feel myself, and hear What from without comes often to my ears, 111 sorting with my present state compared ! When I was yet a child, no childish play To me was pleasing ; all my mind was set 20 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 25 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 30 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 84 SELECTIONS FROM DE QUINCE Y imprisonment, trial, and execution. It is unfortunate, there- fore, 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 5 of the interest grew, no doubt, from the constraint insep- arably 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 sac- rificing all unity of theme, or else by involving the earlier lo half, as a narrative episode, in the latter ; which, however, might have been done, for it might have been communi- cated 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 15 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 20 audacity and suddenness (that were in themselves porten- tous) for introducing the wedge of French native resources, for rekindling the national pride, and for planting the dau- phin once more upon his feet. When Joanna appeared, he had been on the point of giving up the struggle with' the 25 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 deci- sive by its fate for the issue of the war, and then beleaguered by the English with an elaborate application of engineer- 30 ing 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 JOAN OF ARC 85 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 5 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 10 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 15 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 20 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 25 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 30 press with tenfold force upon any French attempt to fore- stall 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 86 SELECTIONS FROM DE QUINCEY 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 5 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 10 so great for France, was she not elated ? Did she not lose, as men so often have lost, all sobriety of mind when stand- ing 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 mani- 15 fested 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 cru- sade against infidels — thus opening the road for a soldierly 20 retreat. She interposed to protect the captive or the wounded ; she mourned over the excesses of her coun- trymen ; she threw herself off her horse to kneel by the dying English soldier, and to comfort him with such min- istrations, physical or spiritual, as his situation allowed. 25 "Nolebat," says the evidence, **uti ense suo, aut quem- quam 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 her- 30 self, 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 approach- ing. Her aspirations pointed only to a place which seemed to her more than usually full of natural piety, as one in JOAN OF ARC 87 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 shep- 5 herdess 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 10 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 15 thQ 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 20 wounds had not taught her caution. And at length, in a sortie from Compiegne (whether through treacherous col- lusion 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. 25 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 30 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 8S SELECTIONS FROM DE QUINCEY 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 5 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 ! lo 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, con- founding the malice of the ensnarer, and making dumb the 15 oracles of falsehood ! Is it not scandalous, is it not humili- ating 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 conclu- sions against his own head ; using the terrors of their power 20 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 grati- tude those whom they had failed to freeze into terror ? Wicked judges! barbarian jurisprudence ! — that, sitting in 25 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 30 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 JOAN OF ARC 89 divinity ; two-edged questions, which not one of them- selves could have answered, without, on the one side, land- ing 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 5 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 10 "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 shat- tering as it was rapid. Another thought to entrap her by asking what language the angelic visitors of her solitude 15 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 Arch- angel Michael had appeared naked. Not comprehending 20 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 25 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 30 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 pro- ceeding, the poor girl fell so ill as to cause a belief that 90 SELECTIONS FROM DE QUINCEY 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 5 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 10 season, which was the most heavenly period of the spring, added stings to this yearning. That was one of her mala- dies — nostalgia^ as medicine calls it ; the other was weari- ness and exhaustion from daily combats with malice. She saw that everybody hated her and thirsted for her blood ; 15 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 20 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 25 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 imperish- 30 able 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. JOAN OF ARC 91 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 5 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 10 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 15 dust from dead men's bones, into the unity of breathing life. If you ca7i 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 20 with the love that burns in depths of admiration, I acknowl- edge 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 dis- 25 tant 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 30 perhaps the Himalayas ? Oh, no ! my friend ; suggest some- thing 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 92 SELECTIONS FROM DE QUINCE Y 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 5 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 deci- phered, that the poor victim in the morning's sacrifice is a 10 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, 15 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 20 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 sun- beams over the hills — yet thought all these things cheaper than the dust upon her sandals, in comparison of deliver- 25 ance 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 30 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 under- JOAN OF ARC 93 went her martyrdom. She was conducted before mid-day, guarded by eight hundred spearmen, to a platform of pro- digious 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. 5 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. 10 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 inge- nuity by which he draws into light from a dark corner a 15 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 satis- 20 factory 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 25 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 30 candour.^ 1 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 94 SELECTIONS FROM DE QUINCE Y 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 unspeak- 5 ably grand. Yet, for a purpose, pointing not at Joanna, 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 Chateau- briand, 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 m.are'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 sus- pect 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 "/dJ 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 conceiv- able 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 JOAN OF ARC 95 but at M. Michelet — viz., to convince him that an English- man 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 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 pretti- ness 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 cer- tain whether the original was Latin. But, however that may have been, if it is possible that M. Michelet * 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 * ^^ 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. 96 SELECTIONS FROM DE QUINCEY me in questioning an opinion of his upon this martyr's firm- ness. 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 oi per- 5 sonal rancour. The martyr was chiefly regarded as the 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 w^e 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 hke 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 remem- bered 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 tres- pass 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 Provi- dence 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. JOAN OF ARC 97 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 spirit- ual. 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. 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, nion cher ? I don't mean to deny it. Running away, in many cases, is a thing so excellent that no phil- osopher would, at times, condescend to adopt any other step. All of us nations in Europe, without one exception, have shown our phil- osophy in that way at times. Even people '-''qui ne se rendeiit pas'*"* have deigned both to run and to shout, ^^ Satwe qui peut T^ 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 phil- osophic, 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 ^^ ra7t before a girV ; 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. 98 SELECTIONS FROM DE QUINCE Y 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 5 innocence could escape that. Now, had she really testified this willingness on the scaffold, it would have argued noth- ing 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, 10 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 15 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 r