" A highly comic state of life for two
private gentlemen! but for two nations, it seems to me, not wholly
comic. Bedlam would be comic, perhaps, if there were only one madman
in it; and your Christmas pantomime is comic, when there is only one
clown in it; but when the whole world turns clown, and paints itself
red with its own heart's blood instead of vermilion, it is something
else than comic, I think.
Mind, I know a great deal of this is play, and willingly allow for
that. You don't know what to do with yourselves for a sensation:
fox-hunting and cricketing will not carry you through the whole of
this unendurably long mortal life: you liked pop-guns when you were
schoolboys, and rifles and Armstrongs are only the same things better
made: but then the worst of it is, that what was play to you when
boys, was not play to the sparrows; and what is play to you now, is
not play to the small birds of State neither; and for the black
eagles, you are somewhat shy of taking shots at them, if I mistake
not.[205]
I must get back to the matter in hand, however. Believe me, without
further instance, I could show you, in all time, that every nation's
vice, or virtue, was written in its art: the soldiership of early
Greece; the sensuality of late Italy; the visionary religion of
Tuscany; the splendid human energy and beauty of Venice.
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