own way."

At last Lord Evelyn spoke; but it was in a meditative fashion, and not
very much to the point. He lay back in his easy-chair, his hands clasped
behind his head, and talked; and his talk was not at all about the
selling of Hill Beeches in Buckinghamshire, but of much more abstract
matters. He spoke of the divine wrath of the reformer--what a curious
thing it was, that fiery impatience with what was wrong in the world;
how it cropped up here and there from time to time; and how one abuse
after another had been burnt up by it and swept away forever. Give the
man possessed of this holy rage all the beauty and wealth and ease in
the world, and he is not satisfied; there is something within him that
vibrates to the call of humanity without; others can pass by what does
not affect themselves with a laugh or a shrug of indifference; he only
must stay and labor till the wrong thing is put right. And how often
had he been jeered at by the vulgar of his time; how Common-Sense had
pointed the finger of scorn at him; how Respectability had called him
crazed! John Brown at Harper's Ferry is only a ridiculous old fool; his
effort is absurd; even gentlemen in the North feel an "intellectual
satisfaction" that he is hanged, because of his "preposterous
miscalculation of possibilities." Yes, no doubt; you hang him, and there
is an end; but "his soul goes marching on," and the slaves are freed!
You want to abolish the Corn-laws?--all good society shrieks at you at
first: you are a Radical, a regicide, a Judas Iscariot; but in time the
nation listens, and the poor have cheap bread. "Mazzini is mad!" the
world cries: "why this useless bloodshed? It is only political murder."
Mazzini is mad, no doubt: but in time the beautiful dream of Italy--of
"Italia, the world's wonder, the world's care"--comes true. And what
matter to the reformer, the agitator, the dreamer, though you stone him
to death, or throw him to the lions, or clap him into a
nineteenth-century prison and shut his mouth that way? He has handed on
the sacred fire. Others will bear the torch; and he who is unencumbered
will outstrip his fellows. The wrong must be put right.

And so forth, and so forth. Brand sat and listened, recognizing here and
there a proud, pathetic phrase of Natalie's, and knowing well whence the
inspiration came; and as he listened he almost felt as though that
beautiful old place in Buckinghamshire was slipping through his fingers.
The sacrifi