That you may live to see it, Antony, is my hope and prayer.
I gave you in a former letter Burke's famous passage on the fate of Marie Antoinette--in some ways the most splendid of his utterances,--and I now am going to quote to you a very great passage from Thomas Carlyle on the same tragic subject.
Courageous was it of Carlyle, who must certainly have been familiar with Burke's noble ejaculation, to challenge it with emulation; but in the result we must admit that he amply justifies his temerity.
The tragic figure of the queen drawn to execution through the roaring mob inspired Carlyle with what is surely his most overwhelming product.
The august shadow of the Bible is dimly apprehended as the words ascend upwards and upwards with simple sublimity to the awful close.
Nothing he wrote in all his multitudinous volumes surpasses this astonishing outburst:--
"Beautiful Highborn that wert so foully hurled low!
"For, if thy being came to thee out of old Hapsburg Dynasties, came it not also out of Heaven? _Sunt lachrymæ rerum, et mentem mortalia tangunt_. Oh! is there a man's heart that thinks without pity of those long months and years of slow-wasting ignominy;--of thy birth soft-cradled, the winds of Heaven not to visit thy face too roughly, thy foot to light on softness, thy eye on splendour; and then of thy death, or hundred deaths, to which the guillotine and Fouquier Tinville's judgment was but the merciful end?
"Look _there_, O man born of woman! The bloom of that fair face is wasted, the hair is grey with care; the brightness of those eyes is quenched, their lids hang drooping, the face is stony pale as of one living in death.
"Mean weeds which her own hand has mended attire the Queen of the World. The death-hurdle, where thou sittest pale, motionless, which only curses environ, has to stop--a people drunk with vengeance will drink it again in full draught, looking at thee there. Far as the eye reaches, a multitudinous sea of maniac heads, the air deaf with their triumph-yell!
"The living-dead must shudder with yet one more pang; her startled blood yet again suffuses with the hue of agony that pale face, which she hides with her hands.
"There is, then, _no_ heart to say, 'God pity thee'?