Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 02.djvu/23

Rh the one was only a lovely mischief-maker and the other only a beautiful assassin. Wherever there is heroism, fidelity to duty, calmness in the face of death, it inspires him; he has sung the dirge of the Girondins as movingly as the requiem of the Swiss. But all aspects, all moods of the great Revolution are reflected in his pages. The pity of it, the terror of it, is always with us, and the mad folly of it is never far off. From the Fall of the Bastille to the Capture of the Tuileries, to the September Massacres, to the deaths of Louis and Marie Antoinette; to Madame Momoro as the Goddess of Reason, to Anacharsis Clootz appearing before the Convention 'with the Human Species at his heels,' and thence to the wild confusion, the breathless struggle of Thermidor, and Robespierre's hideous end—through what scenes of horror and of heroism, through what moods of ruth, and wrath, and scornful laughter have many of us passed in those days when the wonderful History was in the early splendour of its fame, and we ourselves in the first freshness of our enthusiasm ! And for how many more of us has it given to that terrible drama in the life of a foreign people as vivid and imperishable a reality as any passage of our own history that has received the breath of life from Shakespeare or from Scott! H. D. TRAILL.