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Updated: May 26, 2025
It was no deed of a true hero to assassinate a despot, knowing or half knowing that the despot's subjects would immediately elect another. Their languor could not, except rhetorically, be advanced in defence of his own flight. The historian is driven to seek both the explanation and palliation of Lorenzo's failure in the temper of his times.
In the great hall, where by this time physicians and courtiers had gathered round the carcass of the lion, Caesar sank on to a seat, his brow damp with heat, and stared at the floor; while the leeches, who, as Alexandrians for the most part, were anxious not to rouse the despot's rage, assured him that to all appearance the lion, who had been highly fed and getting little exercise, had died of a fit.
He whose courage, will, amazing bravery, Did free his land from a despot's rule, From man's greatest evil, almost slavery, And all that's taught in tyranny's school. Who gave his land its liberty, Who was he? 'T was he who e'er will be our pride. Immortal Washington, Who always did in truth confide. We hail our Washington!
Poetry, that should point the way to the ideal, that should bear witness if not to goodness at least to beauty and to glory, grovels in a base contentment with all that is meanest and shallowest in the present, and owns no source of inspiration but the bidding of superior force, or the insulting bribe of a despot's minion which derides in secret the very flattery it buys.
The sea, which the despot's lust and fear had made so lonely, slept with the white sails of boats secure upon its breast; the little bays and inlets, the rocky clefts and woody dells, had forgotten their desecration; and the gathering twilight, the sweetness of the garden-bordered pathway, and the serenity of the lonely landscape, helped us to doubt history.
Philostratus saw that her appearance had been judiciously cared for; but Caesar's long silence, of which he knew the reason, began to cause him some uneasiness: for, though pain sometimes softened the despot's mood, it more often prompted him to revenge himself, as it were, for his own sufferings, by brutal attacks on the comfort and happiness of others.
If Busti's Lancinus Curtius be the portrait of a humanist, careworn with study, burdened by the laurel leaves that were so dry and dusty if Gaston de Foix in the Brera, smiling at death and beautiful in the cropped bloom of youth, idealise the hero of romance if Michelangelo's Penseroso translate in marble the dark broodings of a despot's soul if Della Porta's Julia Farnese be the Roman courtesan magnificently throned in nonchalance at a Pope's footstool if Verocchio's Colleoni on his horse at Venice impersonate the pomp and circumstance of scientific war surely this Medea exhales the flower-like graces, the sweet sanctities of human life, that even in that turbid age were found among high-bred Italian ladies.
No such profitable harvest had ever been reaped by the farmer. Dauntless and Anne ate off of a sewing-table in the corner. Mrs. Van Truder deliberately refused to hear Mr. Windomshire's timorous suggestion that they "make room" for them at the select table. Silent anathemas accompanied every mouthful of food that went down the despot's throat, but she did not know it.
There is a tacit agreement between them and the government, by which they are bound to keep the people in a state of utter and abject submission to the despot's will, while he, on his part, is bound to collect from the people thus subdued the sums of money necessary for their pay.
They who retained some reminiscences of the liberties once enjoyed by Catholic Europe, and the noble principles of freedom, asserted in the Middle Ages by the monks in their cells, and the most eminent Doctors of the Church from their chairs, became alienated from Catholicity in proportion as they cherished the spirit of resistance, and, unhappily, imbibed the fatal conviction that to overthrow the despot's throne they must break down the altar.
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