THE BOOK WAS DRENCHED - OUDL Home

THE FIRST DEFENCE 23
their throat stuck. And as far as our exiles are concerned—if
you mean them—would that it had stuck there even unto this
day; for we have learned to a certainty that nothing is oftener
upon their lips than curses and imprecations, to be by all good
5 men abhorred certainly, yet not feared. For the rest, it can
scarce be believed that when news of the king's execution arrived,
there was found, especially among a free people, anyone
so much a slave by nature as to calumniate us or count our deed
a crime; but rather that all righteous men said all was right-
10 eous—nay even thanked God for having published so high
and shining an example of justice for so wholesome a lesson to
the rest of the kings.
And so, to those "savage, sternly steeled and stony-hearted"
persons who (he says) bewail the "miserable and amazing
15 marvellous murder" (whose, pray?), to them and their
jingling spokesman, the dullest, surely, "since ever in the
world the kingly name was native and known," I say: "Let.
them wail again! Let them wail again!" But meanwhile what
boy just out of school, or what dear brotherkin from any
20 friary you like, could not have made a rhetorical exercise out
of this royal fall more eloquently—yea, more Latinly—than
this royal speechmaker ?
It would surely be uncalled for were I carefully to follow up
the man's babblings and ravings on the present scale through-
25 out his volume; yet I would do it willingly (for he swells, they
say, with measureless pride and conceit) did he not shield
himself behind the enormous ill-composed disordered bulk of
his book, like Terence's soldier skulking behind the front