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The character of S. is one of the gloomiest and least attractive among English writers. Intensely proud, he suffered bitterly in youth and early manhood from the humiliations of poverty and dependence, which preyed upon a mind in which the seeds of insanity were latent until it became dominated by a ferocious misanthropy.
Yet he saw, he could not but see, the spiritual danger in this rising tide of adulation. He fought against its influence, he prayed against it, he tried to humiliate himself, and his very humiliations increased the adulation. He was perplexed, almost ashamed, and examined himself to see how it was that he himself seemed to be thwarting his own work.
Even on the following day he persisted in the declaration that it was his duty, as a father and a nobleman, to protect his daughter from further humiliations of this sort. Yet when, on the day of fasting, the invitation to sing came, he permitted Barbara to accept it, because it was the Emperor who summoned her.
They met at the door so closely that recognition was inevitable, and Jacobi, with his worst smile, held out his hand, saying at the same moment with diabolic malignity: "I hope I may offer my felicitations to your Excellency!" Ratcliffe was glad to find some victim on whom he could vent his rage. He had a long score of humiliations to repay this man, whose last insult was beyond all endurance.
A good man was in command, however the same Colonel Bullock of the Devons who had distinguished himself at Colenso and every tattered, half-starved wastrel was nerved by a recollection of the humiliations which he had already endured.
Peter the Hermit, standing at his side, spoke first, and told the story of his sojourn at Jerusalem, all he had seen of the miseries and humiliations of the Christians, and all he himself had suffered there, for he had been made to pay tribute for admission into the Holy City, and for gazing upon the spectacle of the exactions, insults, and tortures he was recounting.
It would be a false assumption to suppose that temporary humiliations or mistakes can rid one definitely and finally of the vice I am describing. Arrogance seems too closely knit into the very fibre of early success. The firsthand experience of youth is not sufficient to effect the cure and it may be that no years and no experience will purge the mind of this natural tendency.
I will die rather than endure those humiliations. You are right; were I, like you, so fortunate as to be nothing but a man who had to defend only his own honor and existence, I would be allowed to risk every thing in order to win every thing. But I am the king, and, moreover, the king of an unfortunate state.
Thrown over the foot of the royal bed, my simar, madame, looks not unlike the mantle worn by kings." This was one of the humiliations which Mazarin made Anne undergo more frequently than any other, and one that bowed her head with shame. Queen Elizabeth and Catherine II. of Russia are the only two monarchs of their set on record who were at once sovereigns and lovers.
Henry IV paid for his assertion of prerogative and custom, both by the ignominious though illusory surrender at Canossa , and by the unparalleled humiliations of his latter days, when he was compelled, as the prisoner of his own son, not only to abdicate but also to sign a confession of infamous offences against religion and morality.
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