ambers. That mass of humanity profusely
mixed of good and evil, of generous ire and mutinous, of the passion for
the future of mankind and vanity of person, magnanimity and sensualism,
high judgement, reckless indiscipline, chivalry, savagery, solidity,
fragmentariness, was dust.

The two men composing it, the untamed and the candidate for citizenship,
in mutual dissension pulled it down. He perished of his weakness, but it
was a strong man that fell. If his end was unheroic, the blot does not
overshadow his life. His end was a derision because the animal in him ran
him unchained and bounding to it. A stormy blood made wreck of a splendid
intelligence. Yet they that pronounce over him the ordinary fatalistic
epitaph of the foregone and done, which is the wisdom of men measuring
the dead by the last word of a lamentable history, should pause to think
whether fool or madman is the title for one who was a zealous worker,
respected by great heads of his time, acknowledged the head of the
voluminous coil of the working people, and who, as we have seen,
insensibly though these wrought within him, was getting to purer fires
through his coarser when the final intemperateness drove him to ruin. As
little was he the vanished God whom his working people hailed deploringly
on the long procession of his remains from city to city under charge of
the baroness. That last word of his history ridicules the eulogy of
partisan and devotee, and to commit the excess of worshipping is to
conjure up by contrast a vulgar giant: for truth will have her just
proportions, and vindicates herself upon a figure over-idealized by
bidding it grimace, leaving appraisers to get the balance of the two
extremes. He was neither fool nor madman, nor man to be adored: his last
temptation caught him in the season before he had subdued his blood, and
amid the multitudinously simple of this world, stamped him a tragic
comedian: that is, a grand pretender, a self-deceiver, one of the lividly
ludicrous, whom we cannot laugh at, but must contemplate, to distinguish
where their character strikes the note of discord with life; for
otherwise, in the reflection of their history, life will seem a thing
demoniacally inclined by fits to antic and dive into gulfs. The
characters of the hosts of men are of the simple order of the comic; not
many are of a stature and a complexity calling for the junction of the
two Muses to name them.

While for his devotees he lay still wa