Neither was that an inconsiderable moment when wild armed men first raised their Strongest aloft on the buckler-throne, and with clanging armour and hearts, said solemnly:  Be thou our Acknowledged Strongest!  In such Acknowledged Strongest (well named King, Kon-ning, Can-ning, or Man that was Able) what a Symbol shone now for them,—­significant with the destinies of the world!  A Symbol of true Guidance in return for loving Obedience; properly, if he knew it, the prime want of man.  A Symbol which might be called sacred; for is there not, in reverence for what is better than we, an indestructible sacredness?  On which ground, too, it was well said there lay in the Acknowledged Strongest a divine right; as surely there might in the Strongest, whether Acknowledged or not,—­considering who made him strong.  And so, in the midst of confusions and unutterable incongruities (as all growth is confused), did this of Royalty, with Loyalty environing it, spring up; and grow mysteriously, subduing and assimilating (for a principle of Life was in it); till it also had grown world-great, and was among the main Facts of our modern existence.  Such a Fact, that Louis xiv., for example, could answer the expostulatory Magistrate with his “L’Etat c’est moi (The State?  I am the State);” and be replied to by silence and abashed looks.  So far had accident and forethought; had your Louis Elevenths, with the leaden Virgin in their hatband, and torture-wheels and conical oubliettes (man-eating!) under their feet; your Henri Fourths, with their prophesied social millennium, ’when every peasant should have his fowl in the pot;’ and on the whole, the fertility of this most fertile Existence (named of Good and Evil),—­brought it, in the matter of the Kingship.  Wondrous!  Concerning which may we not again say, that in the huge mass of Evil, as it rolls and swells, there is ever some Good working imprisoned; working towards deliverance and triumph?

How such Ideals do realise themselves; and grow, wondrously, from amid the incongruous ever-fluctuating chaos of the Actual:  this is what World-History, if it teach any thing, has to teach us, How they grow; and, after long stormy growth, bloom out mature, supreme; then quickly (for the blossom is brief) fall into decay; sorrowfully dwindle; and crumble down, or rush down, noisily or noiselessly disappearing.  The blossom is so brief; as of some centennial Cactus-flower, which after a century of waiting shines out for hours!  Thus from the day when rough Clovis, in the Champ de Mars, in sight of his whole army, had to cleave retributively the head of that rough Frank, with sudden battleaxe, and the fierce words, “It was thus thou clavest the vase” (St. Remi’s and mine) “at Soissons,” forward to Louis the Grand and his L’Etat c’est moi, we count some twelve hundred years:  and now this the very next Louis is dying, and so much dying with him!—­Nay, thus too, if Catholicism, with and against Feudalism (but not against Nature and her bounty), gave us English a Shakspeare and Era of Shakspeare, and so produced a blossom of Catholicism—­it was not till Catholicism itself, so far as Law could abolish it, had been abolished here.