reparation. The poor mutineer, who kneels
down to gather into his heart the bullets from twelve firelocks of his
pitying comrades, dies by a most sudden death in Caesar's sense: one shock,
one mighty spasm, one (possibly _not_ one) groan, and all is over. But,
in the sense of the Litany, his death is far from sudden; his offence,
originally, his imprisonment, his trial, the interval between his sentence
and its execution, having all furnished him with separate warnings of his
fate--having all summoned him to meet it with solemn preparation.

Meantime, whatever may be thought of a sudden death as a mere variety in
the modes of dying, where death in some shape is inevitable--a question
which, equally in the Roman and the Christian sense, will be variously
answered according to each man's variety of temperament--certainly, upon
one aspect of sudden death there can be no opening for doubt, that of all
agonies incident to man it is the most frightful, that of all martyrdoms it
is the most freezing to human sensibilities--namely, where it surprises a
man under circumstances which offer (or which seem to offer) some hurried
and inappreciable chance of evading it. Any effort, by which such an
evasion can be accomplished, must be as sudden as the danger which it
affronts. Even _that_, even the sickening necessity for hurrying in
extremity where all hurry seems destined to be vain, self-baffled, and
where the dreadful knell of _too_ late is already sounding in the ears by
anticipation--even that anguish is liable to a hideous exasperation in one
particular case, namely, where the agonising appeal is made not exclusively
to the instinct of self-preservation, but to the conscience, on behalf of
another life besides your own, accidentally cast upon _your_ protection. To
fail, to collapse in a service merely your own, might seem comparatively
venial; though, in fact, it is far from venial. But to fail in a case where
Providence has suddenly thrown into your hands the final interests of
another--of a fellow-creature shuddering between the gates of life and
death; this, to a man of apprehensive conscience, would mingle the misery
of an atrocious criminality with the misery of a bloody calamity. The man
is called upon, too probably, to die; but to die at the very moment when,
by any momentary collapse, he is self-denounced as a murderer. He had but
the twinkling of an eye for his effort, and that effort might, at the best,
have been unava