ious discovery of the civilised ages, by Mrs. Barbauld, Miss
Edgeworth, Adam Smith, and Co. There is no God, but have we not
invented gunpowder?--who wants a God, with that in his pocket?[179]
There is no Resurrection, neither angel nor spirit; but have we not
paper and pens, and cannot every blockhead print his opinions, and the
Day of Judgment become Republican, with everybody for a judge, and the
flat of the universe for the throne? There is no law, but only
gravitation and congelation, and we are stuck together in an everlasting
hail, and melted together in everlasting mud, and great was the day in
which our worships were born. And there is no Gospel, but only, whatever
we've got, to get more, and, wherever we are, to go somewhere else. And
are not these discoveries, to be sung of, and drummed of, and fiddled
of, and generally made melodiously indubitable in the eighteenth century
song of praise?

The Fates will not have it so. No word of song is possible, in that
century, to mortal lips. Only polished versification, sententious
pentameter and hexameter, until, having turned out its toes long enough
without dancing, and pattered with its lips long enough without piping,
suddenly Astraea returns to the earth, and a Day of Judgment of a sort,
and there bursts out a song at last again, a most curtly melodious
triplet of Amphisbaenic ryme. '_Ca ira._'

Amphisbaenic, fanged in each ryme with fire, and obeying Ercildoune's
precept, 'Tong is chefe of mynstrelsye,' to the syllable.--Don
Giovanni's hitherto fondly chanted 'Andiam, andiam,' become suddenly
impersonal and prophetic: IT shall go, and you also. A cry--before it is
a song, then song and accompaniment together--perfectly done; and the
march 'towards the field of Mars. The two hundred and fifty
thousand--they to the sound of stringed music--preceded by young girls
with tricolor streamers, they have shouldered soldier-wise their shovels
and picks, and with one throat are singing _Ca ira_.'[180]

Through all the springtime of 1790, 'from Brittany to Burgundy, on most
plains of France, under most city walls, there march and
constitutionally wheel to the Ca-iraing mood of fife and drum--our clear
glancing phalanxes;--the song of the two hundred and fifty thousand,
virgin led, is in the long light of July.' Nevertheless, another song is
yet needed, for phalanx, and for maid. For, two springs and summers
having gone--amphisbaenic,--on the 28th of August 1792, 'Dumourie