The Complete Works of Brann, the Iconoclast — Volume 01Brann, William Cowper
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The Complete Works of Brann, the Iconoclast — Volume 01
Brann, William Cowper
Brann, William Cowper, 1855-1898; Essays; Reformers
Of course there is now nothing for Trilby to do but to die.
They could be paired off in a kind of morganatic marriage;
but it is customary in novels where the heroine has been
too frolicsome, for her to get comfortably buried instead of
happily married,--and perhaps it is just as well. Even a
French novelist must make some little mock concession to
the orthodox belief that the wage of sin is death. So Trilby
sinks into the grave with a song like the dying swan, and
Little Billee follows suit--upsets the entire Christian religion
by dying very peaceably as an Atheist, without so much as
a shudder on the brink of that outer darkness where there's
supposed to be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Svengali has also fallen by the wayside, a number of
characters have been very happily forgotten, so the story
drags along to the close on three not very attractive legs,
Taffy, the Laird and Gecko. It is a bad drama worse
staged, with an ignorant bawd for heroine, a weak little
thing for leading man, an impossible Caliban for heavy
villain and Atheism for moral. Such is the wonderful work
that has given this alleged land of intelligence a case of
literary mania a potu, set it to singing the praises of a
grimy grisette more melodiously than she warbled,
"mironton, mirontaine" at the bidding of the villainous
Svengali. Such is this new lion of literature who has set
American maids and matrons to paddling about home
barefoot and posing in public with open mouths--flattering
themselves that they resemble a female whom they would
scald if she ventured into their back yard.
BALAAM'S ASS.
AND OTHER BURROS.
"Force first made conquest, and that conquest, law;
Till Superstition taught the tyrant awe,
Then shared the tyranny, then lent it aid,
And gods of conquerors, slaves of subjects made.
She, from the rending earth and bursting skies,
Saw gods descend and fiends infernal rise;
Here fixed the dreadful, there the blest abodes;
Fear made her devils and weak hope her gods;
Gods partial, changeful, passionate, unjust,
Whose attributes were rage, revenge and lust;
Such as the souls of cowards might conceive,
And, formed like tyrants, tyrants would believe.
Zeal then, not charity, became the guide;
And hell was built on spite, and heaven on pride."
--POPE.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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