rifices and Death well-earned? That
twenty-five million hearts have got to such temper, this _is_ the
Anarchy; the soul of it lies in this, whereof not peace can be the
embodiment! The death of Marat, whetting old animosities tenfold, will
be worse than any life. O ye hapless Two, mutually extinctive, the
Beautiful and the Squalid, sleep ye well,--in the Mother's bosom that
bore you both!

This is the History of Charlotte Corday; most definite, most complete:
angelic-demonic: like a Star!

THE SCAPEGOAT

From the 'French Revolution'

To this conclusion, then, hast thou come, O hapless Louis! The Son of
Sixty Kings is to die on the Scaffold by form of Law. Under Sixty
Kings this same form of Law, form of Society, has been fashioning
itself together these thousand years; and has become, one way and
other, a most strange Machine. Surely, if needful, it is also
frightful, this Machine; dead, blind; not what it should be; which,
with swift stroke, or by cold slow torture, has wasted the lives and
souls of innumerable men. And behold now a King himself, or say rather
King-hood in his person, is to expire here in cruel tortures,--like a
Phalaris shut in the belly of his own red-heated Brazen Bull! It is
ever so; and thou shouldst know it, O haughty tyrannous man; injustice
breeds injustice; curses and falsehoods do verily return "always
_home_," wide as they may wander. Innocent Louis bears the sins of
many generations: he too experiences that man's tribunal is not in
this Earth; that if he had no Higher one, it were not well with him.

A King dying by such violence appeals impressively to the imagination;
as the like must do, and ought to do. And yet at bottom it is not the
King dying, but the man! Kingship is a coat: the grand loss is of the
skin. The man from whom you take his Life, to him can the whole
combined world do _more_? Lally went on his hurdle; his mouth filled
with a gag. Miserablest mortals, doomed for picking pockets, have a
whole five-act Tragedy in them, in that dumb pain, as they go to the
gallows, unregarded; they consume the cup of trembling down to the
lees. For Kings and for Beggars, for the justly doomed and the
unjustly, it is a hard thing to die. Pity them all: thy utmost pity,
with all aids and appliances and throne-and-scaffold contrasts, how
far short is it of the thing pitied!

* * * * *

A Confessor has come; Abbe Edgeworth, of Irish extraction, whom