"About a year afterwards, on reviewing his troops, he went to the man who had struck the vase, and _examining his arms, complained_ that _they_ were in bad condition!" (Italics mine) "and threw them" (What? shield and sword?) on the ground. The soldier stooped to recover them; and at that moment the King struck him on the head with his battle-axe, crying 'Thus didst thou to the vase at Soissons.'" The Moral modern historian proceeds to reflect that "this--as an evidence of the condition of the Franks, and of the ties by which they were united, gives but the idea of a band of Robbers and their chief." Which is, indeed, so far as I can myself look into and decipher the nature of things, the Primary idea to be entertained respecting most of the kingly and military organizations in this world, down to our own day; and, (unless perchance it be the Afghans and Zulus who are stealing our lands in England--instead of we theirs, in their several countries.) But concerning the _manner_ of this piece of military execution, I must for the present leave the reader to consider with himself, whether indeed it be less Kingly, or more savage, to strike an uncivil soldier on the head with one's own battle-axe, than, for instance, to strike a person like Sir Thomas More on the neck with an executioner's,--using for the mechanism, and as it were guillotine bar and rope to the blow--the manageable forms of National Law, and the gracefully twined intervention of a polite group of noblemen and bishops. 44. Far darker things have to be told of him than this, as his proud life draws towards the close,--things which, if any of us could see clear _through_ darkness, you should be told in all the truth of them. But we never can know the truth of Sin; for its nature is to deceive alike on the one side the Sinner, on the other the Judge. Diabolic--betraying whether we yield to it, or condemn: Here is Gibbon's sneer--if you care for it; but I gather first from the confused paragraphs which conduct to it, the sentences of praise, less niggard than the Sage of Lausanne usually grants to any hero who has confessed the influence of Christianity.