ist among Nations. England will either learn to reverence its
Heroes, and discriminate them from its Sham-Heroes and Valets and
gaslighted Histrios; and to prize them as the audible God's-voice,
amid all inane jargons and temporary market-cries, and say to them
with heart-loyalty, "Be ye King and Priest, and Gospel and Guidance
for us:" or else England will continue to worship new and ever-new
forms of Quackhood,--and so, with what resiliences and reboundings
matters little, go down to the Father of Quacks! Can I dread such
things of England? Wretched, thick-eyed, gross-hearted mortals, why
will ye worship lies, and 'Stuffed Clothes-suits created by the
ninth-parts of men'! It is not your purses that suffer; your
farm-rents, your commerces, your mill-revenues, loud as ye lament over
these; no, it is not these alone, but a far deeper than these: it is
your souls that lie dead, crushed down under despicable Nightmares,
Atheisms, Brain-fumes; and are not souls at all, but mere succedanea
for _salt_ to keep your bodies and their appetites from putrefying!
Your cotton-spinning and thrice-miraculous mechanism, what is this
too, by itself, but a larger kind of Animalism? Spiders can spin,
Beavers can build and show contrivance; the Ant lays-up accumulation
of capital, and has, for aught I know, a Bank of Antland. If there is
no soul in man higher than all that, did it reach to sailing on the
cloud-rack and spinning sea-sand; then I say, man is but an animal, a
more cunning kind of brute: he has no soul, but only a succedaneum for
salt. Whereupon, seeing himself to be truly of the beasts that perish,
he ought to admit it, I think;--and also straightway universally to
kill himself; and so, in a manlike manner at least _end_, and wave
these brute-worlds _his_ dignified farewell!--

CHAPTER XIV.

SIR JABESH WINDBAG.

Oliver Cromwell, whose body they hung on their Tyburn gallows because
he had found the Christian Religion inexecutable in this country,
remains to me by far the remarkablest Governor we have had here for
the last five centuries or so. For the last five centuries, there has
been no Governor among us with anything like similar talent; and for
the last two centuries, no Governor, we may say, with the possibility
of similar talent,--with an idea in the heart of him capable of
inspiring similar talent, capable of co-existing therewith. When you
consider that Oliver believed in a God, the difference between
Oliv