Page:Note of an English republican on the Muscovite crusade (IA noteofenglishrep00swiniala).pdf/19

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Beaton. But the men of that old revolution, we shall be assured, were no mutinous anarchical conspirators, no blasphemous chaotic rioters, no fitting heads or members for such secret societies as were extinguished in Italy by the godlike advent and heroic genius of Mazzini, and as are alleged to be at this moment engaged in the sure and steady business of undermining all the huge honeycombed fabric of happy and holy Russia. And doubtless in very deed they were not; but surely in their time, on the lips of all men of order and all partisans of reaction, the very best of them and the very wisest was all this and much more. Again, Mr. Carlyle has assuredly never taken part with treason, never ranged himself on the side of a falsehood; the rascal who should assert it would lie like the dastard he must be. We may all of us for example thank heaven, if we will, that in any case the greatest among all our living writers is as wholly and as nobly pure as any republican in Europe from the scandal of having ever burnt so much as one grain of incense on the altars of Thersites Tyrannus, the misshapen counterfeit and misnamed parodist as in burlesque of a mightier malefactor, the one anarch of our time who might most properly have echoed the proud vaunt of his bestial brother in Shakespeare—'I am a bastard begot, bastard instructed, bastard in mind, bastard in valour, in everything illegitimate;' Judas on the throne of Nero, Perinet Leclere in the saddle of Jeanne Darc as saviour of French society and Messiah of Parisian order. But not one of us