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He forgot that the indomitable John Ziska and the iron-flailed peasantry stood between him and his vow. He had first to conquer the reformers before he could punish them, and this was to prove no easy task. The dreadful work of religious war began with the burning of Hussite preachers who had ventured from Bohemia into Germany.
Be the reason whatever it may, certain it is that nothing can be too artificial or high-flown to please the Italian peasantry: its tales are all of kings; princesses, fairies, knights, winged horses, marvellous jewels, and so forth; its songs are almost without exception about love, constancy, moon, stars, flowers.
Yet is not the State endangered by the artisan's throwing off a refuse of ill-paid and starving men who are either too many for the work or unskilful at it? Such an excretion would poison a peasantry, remaining in their body as it were, but artisans are purged thereby. This refuse it is for the State to decide upon.
The walls, and even the floor, were boarded a great piece of luxury in a country where wood is so scarce. The furniture consisted of a broad bedstead, two chests of drawers, and a small table. Chairs and benches are a kind of terra incognita in the dwellings of the Icelandic peasantry; besides, I do not know where such articles could be stowed in a room of such dimensions as that which I occupied.
And I must confess that it was with great interest I learned that the Gipsies, from a very singular and Rommany point of view, respect, and even pay him, in common with the peasantry in some parts of England, a peculiar honour. For this reason I bade the Gipsy carefully repeat his words, and wrote them down accurately. I give them in the original, with a translation.
Every moment the force of the Chevalier was thinned, and every instant the number of his enemies increased, as the neighbouring peasantry rallied round the standard of their chief. Finding the most faithful of his followers stretched upon the earth, D'Arcy sought safety in flight.
The American viceroys and the farmers of the revenue became rich, while the merchants broke, while the peasantry starved, while the body-servants of the sovereign remained unpaid, while the soldiers of the royal guard repaired daily to the doors of convents, and battled there with the crowd of beggars for a porringer of broth and a morsel of bread.
At Tisnacq, between Louvain and Tirlemont, a battle was attempted by a large miscellaneous mass of students, peasantry, and burghers, led by country squires. It soon changed to a carnage, in which the victims were all on one side. A small number of veterans, headed by Vargas, Mendoza, Tassis, and other chivalrous commanders, routed the undisciplined thousands at a single charge.
Of the same race and placed in the same conditions as the Orthodox peasantry around them, they were undoubtedly better housed, better clad, more punctual in the payment of their taxes, and, in a word, more prosperous. All my informants agreed in describing them as quiet, decent, sober people; but regarding their religious doctrines the evidence was vague and contradictory.
There were a hundred and twenty thousand in all, of which about seventeen thousand were ununiformed peasantry. Opposite stood the French, Poniatowski on the right, Davout, with the guard, in the rear, then Eugène; behind Davout, to the left, Ney; and farther behind, in the same line, Junot.
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