"
These disturbers were not so much like men usurping power, as asserting
their natural place in society. Their rising was to illuminate and
beautify the world. Their conquest over their competitors was by
outshining them. The hand that, like a destroying angel, smote the
country, communicated to it the force and energy under which it
suffered. I do not say (God forbid), I do not say, that the virtues of
such men were to be taken as a balance to their crimes: but they were
some corrective to their effects. Such was, as I said, our Cromwell.
Such were your whole race of Guises, Condes, and Colignis. Such the
Richelieus, who in more quite times acted in the spirit of a civil war.
Such, as better men, and in a less dubious cause, were your Henry the
Fourth and your Sully, though nursed in civil confusions, and not wholly
without some of their taint. It is a thing to be wondered at, to see how
very soon France, when she had a moment to respire, recovered and
emerged from the longest and most dreadful civil war that ever was known
in any nation. Why? Because among all their massacres, they had not
slain the MIND in their country. A conscious dignity, a noble pride, a
generous sense of glory and emulation, was not extinguished. On the
contrary, it was kindled and enflamed. The organs also of the state,
however shattered, existed.
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