nies.
To moulder under marble, or to moulder under clay, 'tis still to
moulder. To have around one's bier children in red and children in blue,
or to have not a creature, what matters it?"

These are the gleams of the _mens divinior_, that relieve the perplexing
moral squalor of the portrait. Even here we have the painful innuendo
that a thought which is solemnising and holy to the noble, serves
equally well to point a trait of cynical defiance in the ignoble.

Again, there is an indirectly imaginative element in the sort of terror
which the thoroughness of the presentation inspires. For indeed it is an
emotion hardly short of terror that seizes us, as we listen to the
stringent unflinching paradox of this heterogeneous figure. Rameau is
the squalid and tattered Satan of the eighteenth century. He is a
Mephistopheles out at elbows, a Lucifer in low water; yet always
diabolic, with the bright flash of the pit in his eye. Disgust is
transformed into horror and affright by the trenchant confidence of his
spirit, the daring thoroughness and consistency of his dialectic, the
lurid sarcasm, the vile penetration. He discusses a horrible action, or
execrable crime, as a virtuoso examines a statue or a painting. He has
that rarest fortitude of the vicious, not to shrink from calling his
character and conduct by their names. He is one of Swift's Yahoos, with
the courage of its opinions. He seems to give one reason for hating and
dreading oneself. The effect is of mixed fear and fascination, as of a
magician whose miraculous crystal is to show us what and how we shall
be twenty years from now; or as when a surgeon tells the tale of some
ghastly disorder, that may at the very moment be stealthily preparing
for us a doom of anguish.

Hence our dialogue is assuredly no "meat for little people nor for
fools." Some of it is revolting in its brutal indecency. Even Goethe's
self-possession cannot make it endurable to him. But it is a study to be
omitted by no one who judges the corruption of the old society in France
an important historic subject. The picture is very like the corruption
of the old society in Rome. We see the rotten material which the
purifying flame of Jacobinism was soon to consume out of the land with
fiery swiftness. We watch the very classes from which, as we have been
so often told, the regeneration of France would have come, if only
demagogues and rabble had not violently interposed. There is no gaiety
in the st