or you’ll tell a lie, Moore; you know you will. They were a poor over-wrought band of bondsmen. Tyrants had oppressed them through four hundred years; a feeble mixture of women and children diluted their thin ranks; their masters, who roared to follow them through the divided flood, were a set of pampered Ethiops, about as strong and brutal as the lions of Lybia. They were armed, horsed, and charioted, the poor Hebrew wanderers were a-foot; few of them, it is likely, had better weapons than their shepherds’ crooks, or their masons’ building-tools; their meek and mighty leader himself had only his rod. But bethink you, Robert Moore, right was with them; the God of battles was on their side; crime and the lost archangel generalled the ranks of Pharaoh, and which triumphed? We know that well: ‘The Lord saved Israel that day out of the hand of the Egyptians, and Israel saw the Egyptians dead upon the sea-shore;’ yea, ‘the depths covered them, they sank to the bottom as a stone.’ The right hand of the Lord became glorious in power; the right hand of the Lord dashed in pieces the enemy!”
“You are all right, only you forget the true parallel. France is Israel, and Napoleon is Moses. Europe, with her old over-gorged empires and rotten dynasties is corrupt Egypt; gallant France is the Twelve Tribes, and her fresh and vigorous Usurper the Shepherd of Horeb.”
“I scorn to answer you.”
Moore accordingly answered himself, at least he
