Publisher's Synopsis
we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, wewere all going direct the other way- in short, the period was so far like the present period, thatsome of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlativedegree of comparison only.There were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a plain face, on the throne of England; therewere a king with a large jaw and a queen with a fair face, on the throne of France. In both countriesit was clearer than crystal to the lords of the State preserves of loaves and fishes, that things ingeneral were settled for ever.It was the year of Our Lord one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five. Spiritual revelationswere conceded to England at that favoured period, as at this. Mrs. Southcott had recently attainedher five-and-twentieth blessed birthday, of whom a prophetic private in the Life Guards hadheralded the sublime appearance by announcing that arrangements were made for the swallowing upof London and Westminster. Even the Cock-lane ghost had been laid only a round dozen of years, after rapping out its messages, as the spirits of this very year last past (supernaturally deficient inoriginality) rapped out theirs. Mere messages in the earthly order of events had lately come to theEnglish Crown and People, from a congress of British subjects in America: which, strange to relate, have proved more important to the human race than any communications yet received through anyof the chickens of the Cock-lane brood.France, less favoured on the whole as to matters spiritual than her sister of the shield and trident, rolled with exceeding smoothness down hill, making paper money and spending it. Under theguidance of her Christian pastors, she entertained herself, besides, with such humane achievementsas sentencing a youth to have his hands cut off, his tongue torn out with pincers, and his bodyburned alive, because he had not kneeled down in the rain to do honour to a dirty procession ofmonks which passed within his view, at a distance of some fifty or sixty yards. It is likely enoughthat, rooted in the woods of France and Norway, there were growing trees, when that sufferer wasput to death, already marked by the Woodman, Fate, to come down and be sawn into boards, tomake a certain movable framework with a sack and a knife in it, terrible in history. It is likely enoughthat in the rough outhouses of some tillers of the heavy lands adjacent to Paris, there were shelteredfrom the weather that very day, rude carts, bespattered with rustic mire, snuffed about by pigs, and 4roosted in by poultry, which the Farmer, Death, had already set apart to be his tumbrils of theRevolution. But that Woodman and that Farmer, though they work unceasingly, work silently, andno one heard them as they went about with muffled tread: the rather, forasmuch as to entertain anysuspicion that they were awake, was to be atheistical and traitoro