valiant man. They feel
withal that, if _persiflage_ be the great thing, there never was such a
_persifleur_. He is the realized ideal of every one of them; the thing
they are all wanting to be; of all Frenchmen the most French. He is
properly their god,--such god as they are fit for. Accordingly all
persons, from the Queen Antoinette to the Douanier at the Porte St.
Denis, do they not worship him? People of quality disguise themselves
as tavern-waiters. The Maitre de Poste, with a broad oath, orders his
Postilion, "_Va bon train_; thou art driving M. de Voltaire." At
Paris his carriage is "the nucleus of a comet, whose train fills whole
streets." The ladies pluck a hair or two from his fur, to keep it as a
sacred relic. There was nothing highest, beautifulest, noblest in all
France, that did not feel this man to be higher, beautifuler, nobler.

Yes, from Norse Odin to English Samuel Johnson, from the divine Founder
of Christianity to the withered Pontiff of Encyclopedism, in all times
and places, the Hero has been worshipped. It will ever be so. We all
love great men; love, venerate and bow down submissive before great men:
nay can we honestly bow down to anything else? Ah, does not every true
man feel that he is himself made higher by doing reverence to what is
really above him? No nobler or more blessed feeling dwells in man's
heart. And to me it is very cheering to consider that no sceptical
logic, or general triviality, insincerity and aridity of any Time and
its influences can destroy this noble inborn loyalty and worship that
is in man. In times of unbelief, which soon have to become times of
revolution, much down-rushing, sorrowful decay and ruin is visible
to everybody. For myself in these days, I seem to see in this
indestructibility of Hero-worship the everlasting adamant lower than
which the confused wreck of revolutionary things cannot fall. The
confused wreck of things crumbling and even crashing and tumbling
all round us in these revolutionary ages, will get down so far; _no_
farther. It is an eternal corner-stone, from which they can begin to
build themselves up again. That man, in some sense or other, worships
Heroes; that we all of us reverence and must ever reverence Great Men:
this is, to me, the living rock amid all rushings-down whatsoever;--the
one fixed point in modern revolutionary history, otherwise as if
bottomless and shoreless.

So much of truth, only under an ancient obsolete vesture, bu