tion; I know there are some who would feel no touch of the heroic
tenderness if some day a young man, with red hair, large ears, and
his mother's lozenges in his pocket, were found dead in uniform in the
passes of the Vosges. But on this subject I have heard many philosophies
and thought a good deal for myself; and the conclusion I have come to is
Sacrarterumbrrar pour la Pattie, and it is not likely that I shall alter
it now.

But when I came out of the church there were none of these things,
but only a lot of Shops, including a paper-shop, on which the posters
announced that the negotiations were proceeding satisfactorily.

THE MISER AND HIS FRIENDS

It is a sign of sharp sickness in a society when it is actually led by
some special sort of lunatic. A mild touch of madness may even keep a
man sane; for it may keep him modest. So some exaggerations in the State
may remind it of its own normal. But it is bad when the head is cracked;
when the roof of the commonwealth has a tile loose.

The two or three cases of this that occur in history have always been
gibbeted gigantically. Thus Nero has become a black proverb, not
merely because he was an oppressor, but because he was also an
aesthete—that is, an erotomaniac. He not only tortured other
people's bodies; he tortured his own soul into the same red revolting
shapes. Though he came quite early in Roman Imperial history and was
followed by many austere and noble emperors, yet for us the Roman
Empire was never quite cleansed of that memory of the sexual madman. The
populace or barbarians from whom we come could not forget the hour when
they came to the highest place of the earth, saw the huge pedestal of
the earthly omnipotence, read on it Divus Caesar, and looked up and saw
a statue without a head.

It is the same with that ugly entanglement before the Renaissance, from
which, alas, most memories of the Middle Ages are derived. Louis XI
was a very patient and practical man of the world; but (like many
good business men) he was mad. The morbidity of the intriguer and the
torturer clung about everything he did, even when it was right. And just
as the great Empire of Antoninus and Aurelius never wiped out Nero, so
even the silver splendour of the latter saints, such as Vincent de Paul,
has never painted out for the British public the crooked shadow of Louis
XI. Whenever the unhealthy man has been on top, he has left a horrible
savour that humanity finds stil