There were a Prince with a large jaw and a Princess with a plain face, on the throne of England; there were a prince with the large jaw and a princess with a fair face, on the throne of France. In both countries it was clearer than crystal clear to the lords of the State preserves of loaves and fishes, that things in general were settled for ever.
It was the year of Our Lord one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five. Spiritual revelations were conceded to England at that favored period, as at this. Mrs. Skillet had recently attained her five-and-twentieth blessed birthday, of whom a prophetic private in the Life Guards had heralded the sublime appearance by announcing the arrangements were made for the swallowing up to London and Westminster. Even the Cock-Lane ghost had been laid only a round dozens of year, after rapping out its messages, as the spirits of this very last past (supernaturally deficient in originality) rapped out theirs. Mere messages in the
earthly order of events had lately come to the English Crowned People, from a congress of British subjects in America: which, weird to relate, have proved more important to the human race than any communications yet recieved through any of 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 the guidance of her Christian Pastors, she entertained herself, besides, with such humane achievements as senttencing a youth to have his hands cut off, his tongue torn out with pincers, and his body burned alive, because he had not kneeled down in the rain to do honour to a dirty procession of monks which passed within his view, at a distance of some fifty or sixty yards. It is likely enough that, rooted in the words of France and Norway, there were growing trees, when that sufferer was put to death , already marked by the Woodman, Fate, to come down and be sawn into boards, to make a certain movable frame-work with a sack and a knife in it, terrible in history. It is likely enough that in the rough outhouses of some tillers of the heavy lands adjacent to Paris, there were sheltered from the weather that very day, rude carts, bespattered with rustic mire, snuffed about by pigs, and roosted it by poultry, which the Farmer, Death, had already set apart to be his trumbrils of the Revolution . But, that Woodman and that Farmer, though they work unceasingly, work silently, and no one heard them as they went about with muffled tread: the rather, forasmuch as to entertain any suspicion that they were awake, was to be antheistical and traitorous.
In England, there was scarcely an amount of order and protection to justify much national boast. Daring burglaries by armed men, and highway robberies, took self in the capital itself every night; families were publicly cautioned not to go out on town
without removing their furniture to upholsterer' warehouses for security; the highwayman in the dark was a City tradesman in the light, and, being recognized and challenged by his fellow-tradesman whom he stopped in his character of "the Captain," gallantly shot him through the head and rode away; the mail was waylaid by seven robbers, and the guard shot three dead, and then got shot dead himself by other four, "in consequences of the failure of his ammunition:" after which the mail was robbed in peace; that magnificent potentate, the Lord Mayor of London, was made to stand and deliver on Turnham Green, by one highwayman, who despoiled the illustratious creature in sight of all his retinue; prisoners in London goals fought battles with their turnkeys, and the majesty of the law fired blunderbusses in among them, loaded with rounds of shot and ball; thieves snipped off diamond crosses from the necks of noble Lords at Court drawing- rooms; musketeers fire on the mob; and nobody thought any of these occurrences much out of the common way. In the midst of them, the hangman, ever busy and ever worse than useless, was in constant requisition; now, hanging a housebreaker on Saturday who had been taken on Tuesday; now, burning people in the land at Newgate by dozen, and now burning pamphlets at the door of Westminster Hall; to-day, taking the life of an atrocious murderer, and tomorrow of a wretched pilferer who had robbed a farmer's boy of sixpence.
All these things, and a thousand like them, came to pass in and close upon the dear old year one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five. Environed by them, while the Woodman and the Farmer worked unheeded, those two of the large jaws, and those other two of the plain and the fair faces, trod with stir enough, and carried their divine rights with a high hand. Thus did the year one thousands seven hundred and seventy-five conduct their Greatnesses, and myriads of small creatures - the creatures of this chronicle among the rest - along the roads that lay before lay them.