Ambition was the fault of the seraphim in the
commencement--be well assured that some of the old angelic leaven
lingers still about all of its votaries and victims.
Ay--victims!--for he who was said to have made so many, was himself the
victim of the society that spoiled and flattered him, and fostered his
foibles, in the beginning, with its false and fawning breath, and,
later, blew on him a blast of ice from its remorseless, pestilent jaws,
that froze him out of his humanity.
He could not live--moulded, as he was, of all sweet elements--apart from
social influences, from the regard, the affection, the approbation of
his kind--and he died of heart-starvation; fortunate, indeed, in that he
was mercifully permitted so to die, rather than have lived, as less
fervent natures might have done, in cold and cheerless apathy.
I do not defend his errors; I only seek to extenuate them. Pity and
justice are not the same; but one may still so temper the other that
Mercy, the appointed angel of this earth, may be the result.
Let us, who are mortal and fallible, be wary how we condemn one whose
head was rendered giddy by his very pinnacle of power! Peace be his!
I have diverged so widely from my subject--a most bitter and revolting
one to me, eventually--that I will not return to it just now; nor,
indeed, do I even in thought revert to it with any thing like patience
or pardon.
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