[Footnote A:  In Balthasar, Def. de Guill.  Tell (Lucerne, 1760); Gottl.  Eman. von Haller, Vorlesung ueber Wilh.  Tell, etc. (Bern, 1772); Hisely, Guill.  Tell et la Revolution de 1307 (Delft, 1826); Ideler, Die Sage vom Schuesse des Tell (Berlin, 1836); Haeusser, Die Sage vom Tell (Heidelberg, 1840); Schoenhuth, Wilh.  Tell, Geschichte aus der Vorzeit (Reutlingen, 1836); Henning, Wilh.  Tell (Nuernberg, 1836); and Histoire de Guill.  Tell, Liberateur de la Suisse (Paris, 1843).]

Tell’s posterity in the male line is reported to have died out with Johann Martin, in 1684; the female, with Verena, in 1720.  Yet it is certainly a little surprising that the elder Swiss chroniclers, John of Winterthur, and Justinger of Bern, for instance, who were almost Tell’s contemporaries, make no mention of him in relating the Revolution in the Waldstaette, and that it should be left to Tschudi and others, almost two hundred years afterwards, in the sixteenth century, to give his story that dramatic importance upon which Schiller has set the seal forever.  It can be explained, perhaps, on the ground that it did not at the time possess 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.