"Your pardon, fair lady," I answered; "but you are assuming the premises. Freedom and independence, I would contend, can exist as well--nay, better--in a well-ordered monarchy than in any republic. The tyranny of a number--or of a majority, if you please,--is always more terrible than the tyranny of an individual--the tyranny of public opinion, more potent than the rule of a monarch, and more likely to be wrong. But all that is beside the question. I merely spoke of an historical fact. With an exception here and there, you find no very remarkable poets under republics: many under monarchs." "I have never considered the facts," said Mr. Hubbard; "but let us test it, my dear sir; and to begin with the beginning, there is Homer. It is very true he lived under a whole host of kings, if there is any faith at all to be placed in the tales regarding him; but what say you to the whole batch of Athenian poets?" "That they lived under archons, which were tantamount to kings," I answered. "And then, again, Pindar; he could not even endure the sort of mitigated republicanism of Greece, but fled to the court of a tyrant. Virgil, Horace--every great Roman poet, in short--flourished about the time of the emperors. In England, Gower, Chaucer, Shakespeare, all lived, and wrote, under monarchs; and it has even seemed to me that the greater the despotism, the better the poet." "But Milton! Milton!" cried Mr. Alsiger; "he was a republican in heart and spirit." "But he never wrote a line of poetry," I answered, "under the Long Parliament, or at least very few. Not much did he write under the tyranny of Cromwell; and all his best compositions date from the reign of one or the other of the Charleses." "But Dante," said Mr. Thornton; "I cannot indeed, discuss his merits with you; for I have well nigh forgotten all the Italian I knew thirty years ago. He, however, lived under a republic." "He is an exception," I replied; "although I can hardly look upon the constitution of Florence, at that time, as a republican form of government. It was rather oligarchical; and even then, shadows of an emperor and a pope overhung it. But Ariosto, Tasso, Boccaccio, and all the rest of the Italian poets were the mere creatures of courts. The same is the case with France, although she never had but two poets; and the same with Germany." "May it not be," asked Mr. Hubbard, "that monarchies, up to the present day, have been much more frequent than republics?" "Perhaps so," I answered; "yet it is very strange that we find no poet of mark actually springing from a pure republic. Where is the Swiss poet? although every accessory of country, history, climate, and natural phenomena seems to render the very air redolent of poetry." Bessy Davenport sprang up from the table, shaking her head at me, with a laugh, and saying,-- "I abominate your theory. You are worse than an abolitionist; and if you preach such doctrines here, we will have you tried for high treason."