Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 06.djvu/447

Rh ‘And these are to require all Officers and Soldiers, and others the good People of this Nation of England, to be assisting unto you in this service.

‘Given under our hands and seals,

‘Tetræ belluæ, ac molossis suis ferociores, Hideous monsters, more ferocious than their own mastiffs!’ shrieks Saumaise; shrieks all the world, in unmelodious soul-confusing diapason of distraction,—happily at length grown very faint in our day. The truth is, no modern reader can conceive the then atrocity, ferocity, unspeakability of this fact. First, after long reading in the old dead Pamphlets does one see the magnitude of it. To be equalled, nay to be preferred think some, in point of horror, to ‘the Crucifixion of Christ.’ Alas, in these irreverent times of ours, if all the Kings of Europe were cut in pieces at one swoop, and flung in heaps in St. Margaret’s Churchyard on the same day, the emotion would, in strict arithmetical truth, be small in comparison! We know it not, this atrocity of the English Regicides; shall never know it. I reckon it perhaps the most daring action any Body of Men to be met with in History ever, with clear consciousness, deliberately set themselves to do. Dread Phantoms, glaring supernal on you,—when once they are quelled and their light snuffed out, none knows the terror of the Phantom! The Phantom is a poor paper-lantern with a candle-end in it, which any whipster dare now beard.

A certain Queen in some South-Sea Island, I have read in Missionary Books, had been converted to Christianity; did not any longer believe in the old gods. She assembled her