He broke from Mary presently, strove to interest Sir Walter, and succeeded.

“A benevolent autocracy is the ideal government, my friend—­the ideal of all supreme thinkers—­a Machiavelli, a Nietzsche, a Stendhal, a Gobineau.  Liberty and equality are terms mutually destructive, they cannot exist together; for, given liberty, the strong instantly look to it that equality shall perish.  And rightly so.  Equality is a war cry for fools—­a negation of nature, an abortion.  The very ants know better.  Doubtless you view with considerable distrust the growing spirit of democracy, or what is called by that name?”

“I do,” admitted Sir Walter.

“Your monarch and mine are a little bitten by this tarantula.  I am concerned for them.  We must not pander to the mob’s leaders, for they are not, and never have been, the many-headed thing itself.  They, not the mob, are ‘out to kill,’ as you say.  But that State will soon perish that thinks to prosper under the rule of the proletariat.  Such a constitution would be opposed to natural law and, therefore, contain the seeds of its own dissolution.  And its death would be inconceivably horrible; for the death of huge, coarse organisms is always horrible.  Only distinguished creatures are beautiful in death, or know how to die like gentlemen.”

“Who are on your side to-day, signor?” asked Henry Lennox.

“More than I know, I hope.  Gobineau is my lighthouse in the storm.  You must read him, if you have not done so.  He was the incarnate spirit of the Renaissance.  He radiated from his bosom its effulgence and shot it forth, like the light of a pharos over dark waters; he, best of all men, understood it, and, most of all men, mourned to see its bright hope and glory perish out of the earth under the unconquerable superstition of mankind and the lamentable infliction of the Jewish race.  Alas!  The Jews have destroyed many other things besides the Saviour of us all.”

They found the Renaissance to be the favorite theme of Signor Mannetti.  He returned again and again to it, and it was typical of him that he could combine assurances of being a devout Catholic with sentiments purely pagan.

“Christianity has operated in the making of many slaves and charlatans,” he said.  “One mourns the fact, but must be honest.  It has too often scourged the only really precious members of society from the temple of life.  It has cast the brave and clean and virile into outer darkness, and exalted the staple of humanity, which is never brave, or virile, and seldom really clean.  A hideous wave submerges everything that matters.  The proud, the beautiful—­the only beings that justify the existence of mankind—­ will soon be on the hills with the hawks and leopards, and hunted like them—­outcast, pariah, unwanted, hated.”

“The spirit of christianity is socialistic, I fear,” said Sir Walter.  “It is one of those things I do not pretend to understand, but the modern clergy speak with a clear voice on the subject.”