a little righter. O, if thou really art my _Senior_, Seigneur,
my _Elder_, Presbyter or Priest,--if thou art in very deed my _Wiser_,
may a beneficent instinct lead and impel thee to 'conquer' me, to
command me! If thou do know better than I what is good and right, I
conjure thee in the name of God, force me to do it; were it by never
such brass collars, whips and handcuffs, leave me not to walk over
precipices! That I have been called, by all the Newspapers, a 'free
man' will avail me little, if my pilgrimage have ended in death and
wreck. O that the Newspapers had called me slave, coward, fool, or
what it pleased their sweet voices to name me, and I had attained not
death, but life!--Liberty requires new definitions.

A conscious abhorrence and intolerance of Folly, of Baseness,
Stupidity, Poltroonery and all that brood of things, dwells deep in
some men: still deeper in others an _un_conscious abhorrence and
intolerance, clothed moreover by the beneficent Supreme Powers in what
stout appetites, energies, egoisms so-called, are suitable to
it;--these latter are your Conquerors, Romans, Normans, Russians,
Indo-English; Founders of what we call Aristocracies. Which indeed
have they not the most 'divine right' to found;--being themselves very
truly [Greek: Aristoi], Bravest, Best; and conquering generally a
confused rabble of Worst, or at lowest, clearly enough, of Worse? I
think their divine right, tried, with affirmatory verdict, in the
greatest Law-Court known to me, was good! A class of men who are
dreadfully exclaimed against by Dryasdust; of whom nevertheless
beneficent Nature has oftentimes had need; and may, alas, again have
need.

When, across the hundredfold poor scepticisms, trivialisms, and
constitutional cobwebberies of Dryasdust, you catch any glimpse of a
William the Conqueror, a Tancred of Hauteville or suchlike,--do you
not discern veritably some rude outline of a true God-made King; whom
not the Champion of England cased in tin, but all Nature and the
Universe were calling to the throne? It is absolutely necessary that
he get thither. Nature does not mean her poor Saxon children to
perish, of obesity, stupor or other malady, as yet: a stern Ruler and
Line of Rulers therefore is called in,--a stern but most beneficent
_perpetual House-Surgeon_ is by Nature herself called in, and even the
appropriate _fees_ are provided for him! Dryasdust talks lamentably
about Hereward and the Fen Counties; fate of Ear