Shams are burnt up; nay, what as yet is the peculiarity of France, the very Cant of them is burnt up.  The new Realities are not yet come:  ah no, only Phantasms, Paper models, tentative Prefigurements of such!  In France there are now Four Million Landed Properties; that black portent of an Agrarian Law is as it were realised!  What is still stranger, we understand all Frenchmen have ‘the right of duel;’ the Hackney-coachman with the Peer, if insult be given:  such is the law of Public Opinion.  Equality at least in death!  The Form of Government is by Citizen King, frequently shot at, not yet shot.

On the whole, therefore, has it not been fulfilled what was prophesied, ex-postfacto indeed, by the Archquack Cagliostro, or another?  He, as he looked in rapt vision and amazement into these things, thus spake:  (Diamond Necklace, p. 35.) ’Ha!  What is this?  Angels, Uriel, Anachiel, and the other Five; Pentagon of Rejuvenescence; Power that destroyed Original Sin; Earth, Heaven, and thou Outer Limbo, which men name Hell!  Does the empire Of imposture waver?  Burst there, in starry sheen updarting, Light-rays from out its dark foundations; as it rocks and heaves, not in travail-throes, but in death-throes?  Yea, Light-rays, piercing, clear, that salute the Heavens,—­lo, they kindle it; their starry clearness becomes as red Hellfire!

’Imposture is burnt up:  one Red-sea of Fire, wild-billowing enwraps the World; with its fire-tongue, licks at the very Stars.  Thrones are hurled into it, and Dubois mitres, and Prebendal Stalls that drop fatness, and—­ha! what see I?—­all the Gigs of Creation; all, all!  Wo is me!  Never since Pharaoh’s Chariots, in the Red-sea of water, was there wreck of Wheel-vehicles like this in the Sea of Fire.  Desolate, as ashes, as gases, shall they wander in the wind.  Higher, higher yet flames the Fire-Sea; crackling with new dislocated timber; hissing with leather and prunella.  The metal Images are molten; the marble Images become mortar-lime; the stone Mountains sulkily explode.  Respectability, with all her collected Gigs inflamed for funeral pyre, wailing, leaves the earth:  not to return save under new Avatar.  Imposture, how it burns, through generations:  how it is burnt up; for a time.  The World is black ashes; which, ah, when will they grow green?  The Images all run into amorphous Corinthian brass; all Dwellings of men destroyed; the very mountains peeled and riven, the valleys black and dead:  it is an empty World!  Wo to them that shall be born then!—­A King, a Queen (ah me!) were hurled in; did rustle once; flew aloft, crackling, like paper-scroll.  Iscariot Egalite was hurled in; thou grim De Launay, with thy grim Bastille; whole kindreds and peoples; five millions of mutually destroying Men.  For it is the End of the Dominion of imposture (which is Darkness and opaque Firedamp); and the burning up, with unquenchable fire, of all the Gigs that are in the Earth.’  This Prophecy, we say, has it not been fulfilled, is it not fulfilling?