"Down, down with them!" he muttered between his teeth, though in a tone startlingly deep and audible; "down with them! No quarter to the infidels! strike for England and Effingham. Ha!--who strives for flight there!--kill him! no mercy, I say,--none!--there, there, I have despatched him; ha! ha! What, still alive?--off, slave, off! Oh, slain! slain in a ditch, by a base-born hind; oh, bitter! bitter! bitter!" And with these words, of which the last, from their piercing anguish and keen despair, made a dread contrast with the fire and defiance of the first, the jaw fell, the flashing and fierce eye glazed and set, and all of the haughty and bold patrician which the earth retained was--dust! CHAPTER LXXX. Il n'est jamais permis de deteriorer une ame humaine pour l'avantage des autres, ni de faire un scelerat pour le service des honnetes gens.--ROUSSEAU. ["It is not permitted us to degrade one single soul for the sake of conferring advantage on others, nor to make a rogue for the good of the honest."] As the reader approaches the termination of this narrative, and looks back upon the many scenes he has passed, perhaps, in the mimic representation of human life, he may find no unfaithful resemblance to the true. As, amongst the crowd of characters jostled against each other in their course, some drop off at the first, the second, or the third stage, and leave a few only continuing to the last, while Fate chooses her agents and survivors among those whom the bystander, perchance, least noticed as the objects of her selection; and they who, haply, seemed to him, at first, among the most conspicuous as characters, sink, some abruptly, some gradually, into actors of the least importance in events; as the reader notes the same passion, in different strata, producing the most opposite qualities, and gathers from that notice some estimate of the vast perplexity in the code of morals, deemed by the shallow so plain a science; when he finds that a similar and single feeling will produce both the virtue we love and the vice we detest, the magnanimity we admire and the meanness we despise; as the feeble hands of the author force into contrast ignorance and wisdom, the affectation of philosophy and its true essence, coarseness and refinement, the lowest vulgarity of sentiment with an exaltation of feeling approaching to morbidity, the reality of virtue with the counterfeit, the glory of the Divinity with the hideousness of the Idol, sorrow and eager joy, marriage and death, tears and their young successors, smiles; as all, blent together, these varieties of life form a single yet many-coloured web, leaving us to doubt whether, in fortune the bright hue or the dark, in character the base material or the rich, predominate,--the workman of the web could almost reconcile himself to his glaring and great deficiency in art by the fond persuasion that he has, at least in his choice of tint and texture, caught something of the likeness of