ge in Carlyle's tempestuous narrative of the taking of
the Bastille which has always seemed to me to give it the last
consummate touch of greatness.

Suddenly he pauses in the turmoil and dust and wrath and madness of
that tremendous conflict, and his poetic vision gazes away over
peaceful France, and he exclaims:--

"O evening sun of July, how, at this hour thy beams fall slant on
reapers amid peaceful woody fields; on old women spinning in
cottages; on ships far out on the silent main; on balls at the
Orangerie of Versailles, where high rouged Dames of the palace are
even now dancing with double-jacketed Hussar-officers:--and also
on this roaring Hell-porch of a Hotel de Ville."

And a few sentences further on a heart of stone must be moved by
what the archives of that grim prison-house revealed:--

"Old secrets come to view; and long-buried despair finds voice.
Read this portion of an old letter.

"'If for my consolation Monseigneur would grant me, for the sake
of God and the Most Blessed Trinity, that I could have news of my
dear wife; were it only her name on a card, to show that she is
alive! It were the greatest consolation I could receive; and I
should for ever bless the greatness of Monseigneur.'

"Poor prisoner, who namest thyself Queret-Demery, and hast no
other history,--she is dead, that dear wife of thine, and thou art
dead! Tis fifty years since thy breaking heart put this question;
to be heard now first, and long heard, in the hearts of men."

In the reign of Louis XV. alone, there were no less than fifteen
thousand _lettres de cachet_ issued, by which anyone could be
suddenly arrested, and, without trial, and, heedless of protest,
imprisoned perhaps for life in the Bastille.

In the excesses of the Reign of Terror three or four thousand persons
perished. Their deaths were spectacular, and have covered with
execrations their dreadful executioners.

But it is right that we should remember, Antony, the life-long agony
and the unutterable despair of the victims of that remorselessly cruel
system which the Revolution overthrew.

The chapter on the "Everlasting Yea," in _Sartor Resartus_, seems to
me to come nearer to the above excerpts than anything else in Carlyle,
though at a perceptible distance:--

"O thou that pinest in the imprisonment of the Actual, and criest
bitterly to the gods for a kingdom wherein to rule and