fighting, in good season, if there ever was.
These Sons of the Republic, they rose, in mad wrath, to deliver her from
Slavery and Cimmeria. And have they not done it? Through Maritime Alps,
through gorges of Pyrenees, through Low Countries, Northward along the
Rhine-valley, far is Cimmeria hurled back from the sacred Motherland.
Fierce as fire, they have carried her Tricolor over the faces of all her
enemies;--over scarped heights, over cannon-batteries; down, as with
the Vengeur, into the dead deep sea. She has 'Eleven hundred thousand
fighters on foot,' this Republic: 'At one particular moment she had,' or
supposed she had, 'seventeen hundred thousand.' (Toulongeon, iii. c.
7; v. c. 10, p. 194.) Like a ring of lightning, they, volleying and
ca-ira-ing, begirdle her from shore to shore. Cimmerian Coalition of
Despots recoils; smitten with astonishment, and strange pangs.

Such a fire is in these Gaelic Republican men; high-blazing; which no
Coalition can withstand! Not scutcheons, with four degrees of nobility;
but ci-devant Serjeants, who have had to clutch Generalship out of the
cannon's throat, a Pichegru, a Jourdan, a Hoche, lead them on. They have
bread, they have iron; 'with bread and iron you can get to China.'--See
Pichegru's soldiers, this hard winter, in their looped and windowed
destitution, in their 'straw-rope shoes and cloaks of bass-mat,' how
they overrun Holland, like a demon-host, the ice having bridged all
waters; and rush shouting from victory to victory! Ships in the
Texel are taken by huzzars on horseback: fled is York; fled is the
Stadtholder, glad to escape to England, and leave Holland to fraternise.
(19th January, 1795, Montgaillard, iv. 287-311.) Such a Gaelic fire,
we say, blazes in this People, like the conflagration of grass and
dry-jungle; which no mortal can withstand--for the moment.

And even so it will blaze and run, scorching all things; and, from Cadiz
to Archangel, mad Sansculottism, drilled now into Soldiership, led on
by some 'armed Soldier of Democracy' (say, that Monosyllabic
Artillery-Officer), will set its foot cruelly on the necks of
its enemies; and its shouting and their shrieking shall fill the
world!--Rash Coalised Kings, such a fire have ye kindled; yourselves
fireless, your fighters animated only by drill-serjeants, messroom
moralities, and the drummer's cat! However, it is begun, and will
not end: not for a matter of twenty years. So long, this Gaelic fire,
through it