and in short, as I said before, we should have come just in
time to be hanged. And hanged we should all have been: though _why_,
and upon what principle, it would be difficult to say; and probably
that question would have been left to after consideration in some more
philosophical age. You will suppose naturally that we rejoiced at our
escape; and so undoubtedly we did. Yet for my part I had, among
nineteen-twentieths of joy, just one-twentieth of a lingering regret
that we had missed the picturesque fate that awaited us. The reason
was this: it has been through life an infirmity of Mr. Wilson's (at
least in my judgment an infirmity) to think too indulgently of
Bonaparte, not merely in an intellectual point of view, but even with
reference to his pretensions--hollower, one would think, than the
wind--to moral elevation and magnanimity. Such a mistake, about a man
who could never in any one instance bring himself to speak generously,
or even forbearingly of an enemy, rouses my indignation as often as I
recur to it; and in Professor Wilson, I have long satisfied myself
that it takes its rise from a more comprehensive weakness, the
greatest in fact which besets his mind, viz. a general tendency to
bend to the prevailing opinion of the world, and a constitutional
predisposition, to sympathise with power and whatsoever is triumphant.
Hence, I could not but regret most poignantly the capital opportunity
I had forfeited of throwing in a deep and stinging sarcasm at his
idol, just at the moment when we should have been waiting to be
turned off. I know Professor Wilson well: though a brave man, at
twenty-two he enjoyed life with a rapture that few men have ever
known, and he would have clung to it with awful tenacity. Horribly he
would have abominated the sight of the rope, and ruefully he would
have sighed if I had suggested to him on the gallows any thoughts of
that beautiful and quiet Elleray which he had left behind in England.
Just at that moment I acknowledge that it would have been fiendish,
but yet what a heaven of a luxury it would have been in the way of
revenge--to have stung him with some neat epigram, that I might have
composed in our walk to the gallows, or while the ropes were getting
into tune, on the generosity and magnanimity of Bonaparte! Perhaps, in
a sober estimate, hanging might be too heavy a price for the
refutation of a single error; yet still, at times, when my moral sense
is roused and provoked by the o