ocks, and fled through the land of the men of Schwyz. But the Bailiff
escaped the storm also, and landed by Kuessnacht, where he fell with
Tell's arrow through him.

It should be remembered that this was Tell's deed alone: the hour which
the people had agreed upon for their deliverance had not come; they had
no part in the death of Gessler. Carlyle has remarked this as appearing
also in Schiller's drama, in the construction of which, he says, "there
is no connection, or a very slight one, between the enterprise of Tell
and that of the men of Ruetli." It was not a deed conformable to law
or the highest ethics, yet it was one which mankind is ever ready to
forgive and applaud; and the echo of it through the ages will die away
only when hatred of tyranny and wrathful impatience under hopeless
oppression die away also from the hearts of men. Tell was an outlaw, and
he took an outlaw's vengeance: it was life against life. And yet it is a
curious fact, that the historian of Switzerland (that wonderful genius,
Johannes Mueller, who is reported to have read more books than any man in
Europe, in proof of which they point you to his fifty folio volumes of
excerpts in the Town Library at Schaffhausen) suggests as a reason why
there were only one hundred and fourteen persons, who had known Tell,
to gather together in 1388, not much more than thirty years after his
death, at the erection of a chapel dedicated to his memory on the rock
where he leaped ashore, that Tell did not often leave Buerglen, where he
dwelt, and that, according to the ethics of that period, the deed was
not one likely to attract inquisitive wonderers to him.

There is hardly an event or character in history which is not to
somebody a myth or a phantom; and so Tell has not escaped the skepticism
of men. But those who doubt his existence have little experience of
history, says Mueller. Grasser was the first to remark the resemblance
between the adventures of Tell and those of a certain Tocco, or Toke, or
Palnatoke, of Denmark, which are related by Saxo Grammaticus, a learned
historian who flourished in Denmark in the twelfth century, of which
kingdom and its dependencies he compiled an elaborate history, first
printed at Paris in 1486; but the Danish Tocco, who is supposed to have
existed in the latter half of the tenth century, was wholly unknown
to the Swiss, who, if ever, came to the Alps before that time. The
Icelanders, also, have a similar story about anoth