For it is true that the main truths preached and enforced and insisted on by such fanatical rhetoricians as Milton, as Mazzini, or as Hugo, are as old as the very notion of right and wrong, as the rudest and crudest conception of truth itself; and it is undeniable that the Gospel according to St. Coprostom has the invaluable merit of pungent eccentricity and comparatively novel paradox. The evangelist of "golden silence"--whose own speech, it may be admitted, was "quite other" than "silvern"--is logically justified in his blatant but ineffable contempt for the dull old doctrines of mere mercy and righteousness, of liberty that knows no higher law than duty, of duty that depends for its existence on the existence of liberty. Such a creed, in the phrase of a brother philosopher whose "reminiscences" may be gathered from Shakespeare, and whose views of his contemporaries were identical in tone and expression with the opinions of Mr. Carlyle on his, was mouldy before our grandsires had nails on their toes. It is far more intelligent, more original, more ingenious than all the old cant and rant against priests and kings and vow-breakers and blood-spillers, to discover the soul of goodness in Ratbert the Second or Napoleon the Third, and observingly distill it out into analytic and mono-dramatic blank verse. And it will never be said that this reaction against the puerile or senile preference of right to wrong and principle to prosperity has not been carried far enough in our time. Carlyle, the man of brass, and Musset, the man of clay, as far apart on all other points as two writers of genius could well be, have shown themselves at one in high-souled scorn for "principles of mere rebellion" such as Landor's and Milton's, or for such "belief in a new Brutus" as might disturb the dream of Augustulus. But, even as an old paradox becomes with time a commonplace, so does an old commonplace become in its turn a paradox; and a generation whose poets and historians have long blown the trumpet before the legitimacy of Romanoffs or the bastardy of Bonapartes may properly be startled and scandalized at the childish eccentricity of an old-world idealist who maintains his obsolete and preposterous belief that massacre is murder, that robbery is theft, and that perjury is treason. No newer doctrine, no sounder philosophy, no riper wisdom than this, can be gathered from the declamations of those idle old men--as Goneril, for example, would have called them--who speak this poet's mind again and again in verse which has no more variety of splendor or magnificence of music than the sea. Hélas, on voit encor les astres se lever, L'aube sur l'Apennin jeter sa clarté douce, L'oiseau faire son nid avec des brins de mousse, La mer battre les rocs dans ses flux et reflux, Mais la grandeur des cœurs c'est ce qu'on ne voit plus. There is nothing ingenious in that; it is no better, intellectually considered, than a passage of Homer or Isaiah.