y that pronounce over him the ordinary
fatalistic epitaph of the foregone and done, which is the wisdom of
men measuring the dead by the last word of a lamentable history, should
pause to think whether fool or madman is the title for one who was a
zealous worker, respected by great heads of his time, acknowledged the
head of the voluminous coil of the working people, and who, as we have
seen, insensibly though these wrought within him, was getting to purer
fires through his coarser when the final intemperateness drove him to
ruin. As little was he the vanished God whom his working people hailed
deploringly on the long procession of his remains from city to city
under charge of the baroness. That last word of his history ridicules
the eulogy of partisan and devotee, and to commit the excess of
worshipping is to conjure up by contrast a vulgar giant: for truth
will have her just proportions, and vindicates herself upon a figure
over-idealized by bidding it grimace, leaving appraisers to get the
balance of the two extremes. He was neither fool nor madman, nor man to
be adored: his last temptation caught him in the season before he had
subdued his blood, and amid the multitudinously simple of this
world, stamped him a tragic comedian: that is, a grand pretender, a
self-deceiver, one of the lividly ludicrous, whom we cannot laugh at,
but must contemplate, to distinguish where their character strikes the
note of discord with life; for otherwise, in the reflection of their
history, life will seem a thing demoniacally inclined by fits to antic
and dive into gulfs. The characters of the hosts of men are of the
simple order of the comic; not many are of a stature and a complexity
calling for the junction of the two Muses to name them.

While for his devotees he lay still warm in the earth, that other, the
woman, poor Clotilde, astonished her compatriots by passing comedy and
tragic comedy with the gift of her hand to the hand which had slain
Alvan. In sooth, the explanation is not so hard when we recollect our
knowledge of her. It was a gentle youth; her parents urged her to it: a
particular letter, the letter of the challenge to her father, besliming
her, was shown;--a hideous provocation pushed to the foullest. Who can
blame Prince Marko? who had ever given sign of more noble bravery than
he? He had stood to defend her name and fame. He was very love, the
never extinguished torch of love. And he hung on her for the little of
li