Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 04.djvu/147

 subterranean Baron, jargons and jangles in an unmelodious manner. Thomas Paine's face is red-pustuled, 'but the eyes uncommonly bright.' Convention Deputies ask you to dinner: very courteous; and 'we all play at plumpsack.' 'It is the Explosion and New-creation of a World,' says Forster; 'and the actors in it, such small mean objects, buzzing round one like a handful of flies.'—

Likewise there is war with Spain. Spain will advance through the gorges of the Pyrenees; rustling with Bourbon banners, jingling with artillery and menace. And England has donned the red coat; and marches, with Royal Highness of York,—whom some once spake of inviting to be our King. Changed that humour now: and ever more changing; till no hatefuler thing walk this Earth than a denizen of that tyrannous Island; and Pitt be declared and decreed, with effervescence, 'L'ennemi du genre humain, The enemy of mankind'; and, very singular to say, you make order that no Soldier of liberty give quarter to an Englishman. Which order, however, the Soldier of liberty does but partially obey. We will take no Prisoners then, say the Soldiers of liberty; they shall all be 'Deserters' that we take. It is a frantic order; and attended with inconvenience. For surely, if you give no quarter, the plain issue is that you will get none; and so the business become as broad as it was long.—Our 'recruitment of Three-hundred Thousand men,' which was the decreed force for this year, is like to have work enough laid to its hand.

So many enemies come wending on; penetrating through throats of mountains, steering over the salt sea; towards all points of our territory; rattling chains at us. Nay, worst of all: there is an enemy within our own territory itself. In the early days of March, the Nantes Postbags do not arrive; there arrive only instead of them Conjecture, Apprehension, bodeful wind of Rumour. The bodefulest proves true. Those fanatic