insensibly though these wrought within him, was getting to purer fires through his coarser when the final intemperateness drove him to ruin.  As little was he the vanished God whom his working people hailed deploringly on the long procession of his remains from city to city under charge of the baroness.  That last word of his history ridicules the eulogy of partisan and devotee, and to commit the excess of worshipping is to conjure up by contrast a vulgar giant:  for truth will have her just proportions, and vindicates herself upon a figure over-idealized by bidding it grimace, leaving appraisers to get the balance of the two extremes.  He was neither fool nor madman, nor man to be adored:  his last temptation caught him in the season before he had subdued his blood, and amid the multitudinously simple of this world, stamped him a tragic comedian:  that is, a grand pretender, a self-deceiver, one of the lividly ludicrous, whom we cannot laugh at, but must contemplate, to distinguish where their character strikes the note of discord with life; for otherwise, in the reflection of their history, life will seem a thing demoniacally inclined by fits to antic and dive into gulfs.  The characters of the hosts of men are of the simple order of the comic; not many are of a stature and a complexity calling for the junction of the two Muses to name them.

While for his devotees he lay still warm in the earth, that other, the woman, poor Clotilde, astonished her compatriots by passing comedy and tragic comedy with the gift of her hand to the hand which had slain Alvan.  In sooth, the explanation is not so hard when we recollect our knowledge of her.  It was a gentle youth; her parents urged her to it:  a particular letter, the letter of the challenge to her father, besliming her, was shown;—­a hideous provocation pushed to the foullest.  Who can blame Prince Marko? who had ever given sign of more noble bravery than he?  He had stood to defend her name and fame.  He was very love, the never extinguished torch of love.  And he hung on her for the little of life appearing to remain to him.  Before heaven he was guiltless.  He was good.  Her misery had shrunk her into nothingness, and she rose out of nothingness cold and bloodless, bearing a thought that she might make a good youth happy, or nurse him sinking—­be of that use.  Besides he was a refuge from the roof of her parents.  She shut her eyes on the past, sure of his goodness; goodness, on her return to some sense of being, she prized above other virtues, and perhaps she had a fancy that to be allied to it was to be doing good.  After a few months she buried him.  From that day, or it may be, on her marriage day, her heart was Alvan’s.  Years later she wrote her version of the story, not sparing herself so much as she supposed.  Providence and her parents were not forgiven.  But as we are in her debt for some instruction, she may now be suffered to go.

     Etext editor’s bookmarks