s that importance which we have been taught to give it; though
roughly, thus, we do away with the poetry of it, to be sure. Let
Voltaire, whose function it was to deny, enjoy his feeble sneer, that
"the difficulty of pronouncing those respectable names"--to wit,
_Melchtad_, and _Stauffager_, and _Valtherfurst_, to say nothing of
_Grisler_--"injures their celebrity." Neither are we to conceal the
fact, that it is doubted, if not denied, that there ever was any Gessler
in Uri to perform all the wicked things ascribed to him, and to get that
arrow through him in such dramatic and effective manner in the Hollow
Way; for has not Kopp published, with edifying explanation, "Documents
for the History of the Confederation," (Lucerne, 1835,) in which, in the
list of Bailiffs (_Landvoigte_) at Kuessnacht, we do not find the name of
Gessler? Perhaps there was a mistake in the name, the critic suggests.

The Revolution thus begun at the Ruetli, and by Tell, went forward
swiftly in January, 1308; and, true to their oath, it was consummated
by the men of Schwyz without harm to the property of the Bailiffs, also
without the spilling of a single drop of blood. The prison at Uri was
captured, and Landenberg also, as he descended to hear mass, by twenty
men from Unterwalden; but, escaping, he fled across the meadows from
Sarnen to Alpnach, where he was overtaken and made to swear that he
would never set foot again in the Waldstaette, and then suffered to
depart safely to the King. And the peasants breathed again; and
Stauffacher's wife opened her house to all who had been at the Ruetli;
and there was joy in the land.

And how in that same year Duke Albrecht met with a bloody end, such as
befell no King or Emperor of the Germans before or after him, at the
hands of Duke John, his nephew, whose inheritance he had kept back, and
other conspirators; and what vengeance overtook the murderers; and how
Duke John, escaping in the habit of a monk into Italy, was no more heard
of, but became a shadow forever, like the rest of them;--and how, eight
years afterwards, came the expedition of Duke Leopold of Austria against
the Waldstaette, and the fight at Morgarten, where the Swiss, thirteen
hundred mountaineers in all, Wilhelm Tell among them, routed twenty
thousand of the well-armed chivalry of Austria,--dating from that heroic
Thermopylae of theirs the foundation of the Swiss Confederacy, as,
larger and perhaps not less resolute, we see it to-day,