Bistonii stabulum regis, Busiridis aras, Antiphatæ mensas, et Taurica regna Thoantis;--
should I take for true story the highest cruelty as it was fancied by the most hieroglyphical Egyptian, this alone would weigh them down, as if the Alps were put in a scale against the dust of a balance. For had this accursed treason prospered, we should have had the whole kingdom mourn for the inestimable loss of its chiefest glory, its life, its present joy, and all its very hopes for the future. For such was their destined malice, that they would not only have inflicted so cruel a blow, but have made it incurable, by cutting off our supplies of joy, the whole succession of the Line Royal. Not only the vine itself, but all the _gemmulæ_, and the tender olive branches, should either have been bent to their intentions, and made to grow crooked, or else been broken.
"And now, after such a sublimity of malice, I will not instance in the sacrilegious ruin of the neighbouring temples, which needs must have perished in the flame,--nor in the disturbing the ashes of our intombed kings, devouring their dead ruins like sepulchral dogs,--these are but minutes, in respect of the ruin prepared for the living temples:--
Stragem sed istam non tulit Christus cadentum Principum Impune, ne forsan sui Patris periret fabrica. Ergo quæ poterit lingua retexere Laudes, Christe, tuas, qui domitum struis Infidum populum cum Duce perfido!"
In such strains of eloquent indignation did Jeremy Taylor's young oratory inveigh against that stupendous attempt, which he truly says had no parallel in ancient or modern times. A century and a half of European crimes has elapsed since he made the assertion, and his position remains in its strength. He wrote near the time in which the nefarious project had like to have been completed. Men's minds still were shuddering from the recentness of the escape. It must have been within his memory, or have been sounded in his ears so young by his parents, that he would seem, in his maturer years, to have remembered it. No wonder then that he describes it in words that burn. But to us, to whom the tradition has come slowly down, and has had time to cool, the story of Guido Vaux sounds rather like a tale, a fable, and an invention, than true history. It supposes such gigantic audacity of daring, combined with such more than infantile stupidity in the motive,--such a combination of the fiend and the monkey,--that credulity is almost swallowed up in contemplating the singularity of the attempt. It has accordingly, in some degree, shared the fate of fiction. It is familiarized to us in a kind of serio-ludicrous way, like the story of _Guy of Warwick_, or _Valentine and Orson_. The way which we take to perpetuate the memory of this deliverance is well adapted to keep up this fabular notion. Boys go about the streets annually with a beggarly scarecrow dressed up, which is to be burnt, indeed, at night, with holy zeal; but, meantime, they beg a penny for _poor Guy_: this periodical petition, which we have heard from our infancy,--combined with the dress and appearance of the effigy, so well calculated to move compassion,--has the effect of quite removing from our fancy the horrid circumstances of the story which is thus commemorated; and in _poor Guy_ vainly should we try to recognize any of the features of that tremendous madman in iniquity, Guido Vaux, with his horrid crew of accomplices, that sought to emulate earthquakes and bursting volcanoes in their more than mortal mischief.