THE ONE INSTITUTION. : 247 you bade them: this, à priori, does it not seem one of the impossiblest things? Yet look, behold it in the stolidest of Donothing Governments, that impossibility is a thing done. See it there, with buff-belts, red coats on its back; walking sentry at guardhouses, brushing white breeches in barracks; an indisputable palpable fact. Out of grey Antiquity, amid all finance-difficulties, scaccarium-tallies, ship-monies, coat-andconduct monies, and vicissitudes of Chance and Time, there, down to the present blessed hour, it is. Often, in these painfully decadent and painfully nascent Times, with their distresses, inarticulate gaspings and 'impossibilities;' meeting a tall Lifeguardsman in his snow-white trousers, or seeing those two statuesque Lifeguardsmen in their frowning bearskins, pipe-clayed buckskins, on their coal-black sleek-fiery quadrupeds, riding sentry at the Horse-Guards,-it strikes one with a kind of mournful interest, how, in such universal downrushing and wrecked impotence of almost all old institutions, this oldest Fighting Institution is still so young! Freshcomplexioned, firm-limbed, six feet by the standard, this fighting-man has verily been got up, and can fight. While so much has not yet got into being; while so much has gone gradually out of it, and become an empty Semblance or Clothessuit; and highest king's-cloaks, mere chimeras parading under them so long, are getting unsightly to the earnest eye, unsightly, almost offensive, like a costlier kind of scarecrow'sblanket,-here still is a reality. Strange, interesting, and yet most mournful to reflect on. Was this, then, of all the things mankind had some talent for, the one thing important to learn well, and bring to perfection; this of successfully killing one another? Truly you have learned it well, and carried the business to a high perfection. It is incalculable what, by arranging, commanding and regimenting, you can make of men. These thousand straight-standing firmset individuals, who shoulder arms, who march, wheel, advance, retreat; and are, for your behoof, a magazine charged with fiery death, in the most perfect condition of potential activity; few months ago, till the persuasive sergeant came, what were they? Multiform ragged losels, runaway apprentices, starved weavers, thievish valets; an entirely broken population, fast tending towards the treadmill. But the persuasive sergeant came; by tap of drum enlisted, or formed lists of them, took heartily to drilling them;—and he and you have made them this! Most potent, effectual for all work whatsoever, is wise planning, firm combining and commanding among men. Let no man despair of Governments who looks on these two sentries at the Horse-Guards, and our United-Service Clubs! I could conceive an Emigration Service, a Teaching Service, considerable varieties of United and Separate Services, of the due thousands strong, all effective as this Fighting Service is; all doing their work, like it;—which work, much more than fighting, is henceforth the necessity of these New Ages we are got into Much lies among us, convulsively, nigh desperately struggling to be born. Past and Present, 349, 351. HISTORICAL. THE LAWS OF PERSPECTIVE IN HISTORY. Look back from end to beginning, over any History; over our own England: how, in rapidest law of perspective, it dwindles from the canvass ! An unhappy Sybarite, if we stand within two centuries of him and name him Charles Second, shall have twelve times the space of a heroic Alfred; two or three thousand times, if we name him George the Fourth. The whole Saxon Heptarchy, though events, to which Magna Charta and the world-famous Third Reading, are as dust in the balance, took place then,—for did not England, to mention nothing else, get itself, if not represented in Parliament, yet converted to Christianity ?-the whole Saxon Heptarchy, I say, is summed up practically in that one sentence of Milton's, the only one succeeding writers have copied, or readers remembered, of the 'fighting and flocking of kites and crows.' Neither was that an unimportant wassail-night, when the two black-browed Brothers, strongheaded, headstrong, Hengst and Horsa (Stallion and Horse), determined on a man-hunt in Britain, the boar-hunt at home having got over-crowded; and so, of a few hungry Angles made an English Nation, and planted it here, and-produced thee, O Reader! Of Hengst's whole campaignings scarcely half a page of good Narrative can now be written; the Lord Mayor's Visit to Oxford standing, meanwhile, revealed to mankind in a respectable volume. Nay, what of this? Does not the Destruction of a Brunswick Theatre take above a million times as much telling as the Creation of a World? |