But there is another and separate agency through which the fear of death may happen to act as a disturbing force, and most irregularly as viewed in relation to moral courage and strength of mind. This anomalous force is the imaginative and shadowy terror with which different minds recoil from death--not considered as an agony or torment, but considered as a mystery, and, next after God, as the most infinite of mysteries. In a brave man this terror may happen to be strong; in a pusillanimous man, simply through inertness and original feebleness of imagination, may happen to be scarcely developed. This oscillation of horror, alternating between death as an agony and death as a mystery, not only exists with a corresponding set of consequences accordingly as one or other prevails, but is sometimes consciously contemplated and put into the scales of comparison and counter valuation. For instance, one of the early Csesars reviewed the case thus: "_Emori nolo; me esse mortuum nihil cestumo_: From death as the act and process of dying, I revolt; but as to death, viewed as a permanent state or condition, I don't value it at a straw." What this particular Caesar detested, and viewed with burning malice, was death the agony--death the physical torment. As to death the mystery, want of sensibility to the infinite and the shadowy had disarmed _that_ of its terrors for him. Yet, on the contrary, how many are there who face the mere physical anguish of dying with stern indifference! But death the mystery,--death that, not satisfied with changing our objective, may attack even the roots of our subjective,--_there_ lies the mute, ineffable, voiceless horror before which all human courage is abashed, even as all human resistance becomes childish when measuring itself against gravitation. [7] "_Not yet altogether obsolete_."--Written in 1833. CHAPTER X. FRENCH INVASION OF IRELAND, AND SECOND REBELLION. The decisive battle of Vinegar Hill took place at midsummer; and with that battle terminated the First Rebellion. Two months later, a French force, not making fully a thousand men, under the command of General Humbert, landed on the west coast of Ireland, and again roused the Irish peasantry to insurrection. This latter insurrection, and the invasion which aroused it, naturally had a peculiar interest for Lord Westport and myself, who, in our present abode of Westport House, were living in its local centre.