The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. 03Stevenson, Robert Louis
History
The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. 03
Stevenson, Robert Louis
English literature -- 19th century; Horror tales; Literature -- History and criticism
themselves in the ruin, he concludes with a last rhetorical flourish:
"And therefore let all men be advertised, for THE TRUMPET HATH ONCE
BLOWN."
The capitals are his own. In writing, he probably felt the want of some
such reverberation of the pulpit under strong hands as he was wont to
emphasise his spoken utterances withal; there would seem to him a want
of passion in the orderly lines of type; and I suppose we may take the
capitals as a mere substitute for the great voice with which he would
have given it forth, had we heard it from his own lips. Indeed, as it
is, in this little strain of rhetoric about the trumpet, this current
allusion to the fall of Jericho, that alone distinguishes his bitter and
hasty production, he was probably right, according to all artistic
canon, thus to support and accentuate in conclusion the sustained
metaphor of a hostile proclamation. It is curious, by the way, to note
how favourite an image the trumpet was with the Reformer. He returns to
it again and again; it is the Alpha and Omega of his rhetoric; it is to
him what a ship is to the stage sailor; and one would almost fancy he
had begun the world as a trumpeter's apprentice. The partiality is
surely characteristic. All his life long he was blowing summonses before
various Jerichos, some of which fell duly, but not all. Wherever he
appears in history his speech is loud, angry, and hostile; there is no
peace in his life, and little tenderness; he is always sounding
hopefully to the front for some rough enterprise. And as his voice had
something of the trumpet's hardness, it had something also of the
trumpet's warlike inspiration. So Randolph, possibly fresh from the
sound of the Reformer's preaching, writes of him to Cecil: "Where your
honour exhorteth us to stoutness, I assure you the voice of one man is
able, in an hour, to put more life in us than six hundred trumpets
continually blustering in our ears."[66]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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