It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was
the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch
of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of
Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it
was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had
nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all
going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the
present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on
its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree
of comparison only.
There were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a plain face,
on the throne of England; there were a king with a large jaw and a
queen with a fair face, on the throne of France. In both countries
it was clearer than crystal to the lords of the State preserves of
loaves and fishes, that things in general were settled for
ever.
It was the year of Our Lord one thousand seven hundred and
seventy-five. Spiritual revelations were conceded to England at
that favoured period, as at this. Mrs.
Southcott had recently attained her five-and-twentieth blessed
birthday, of whom a prophetic private in the Life Guards had
heralded the sublime appearance by announcing that arrangements
were made for the swallowing up of London and Westminster. Even the
Cocklane ghost had been laid only a round dozen of years, after
rapping out its messages, as the spirits of this very year last
past supernaturally deficient in originality rapped out theirs.
Mere messages in the earthly order of events had lately come to the
English Crown and People, from a congress of British subjects in
America: which, strange to relate, have proved more important to
the human race than any communications yet received through any of
the chickens of the Cock-lane brood.
France, less favoured on the whole as to matters spiritual than
her sister of the shield and trident, rolled with exceeding
smoothness down hill, making paper money and spending it. Under the
guidance of her Christian pastors, she entertained herself,
besides, with such humane achievements as sentencing a youth to
have his hands cut off, his tongue torn out with pincers, and his
body burned alive, because he had not kneeled down in the rain to
do honour to a dirty procession of monks which passed within his
view, at a distance of some fifty or sixty yards. It is likely
enough that, rooted in the woods of France and Norway, there were
growing trees, when that sufferer was put to death, already marked
by the Woodman, Fate, to come down and be sawn into boards, to make
a certain movable framework with a sack and a knife in it, terrible
in history. It is likely enough that in the rough outhouses of some
tillers of the heavy lands adjacent to Paris, there were sheltered
from the weather that very day, rude carts, bespattered with rustic
mire, snuffed about by pigs, and roosted in by poultry, which the
Farmer, Death, had already set apart to be his tumbrils of the
Revolution. But that Woodman and that Farmer, though they work
unceasingly, work silently, and no one heard them as they went
about with muffled tread: the rather, forasmuch as to entertain any
suspicion that they were awake, was to be atheistical and
traitorous.
……
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