Really quite Homeric—with a difference. This sort of thing would tell amazingly with the "three jolly butcher-boys all in a row." But again—
Think of it! dream! The cleaver climbs aloof.
A clink, a clanking swoop, a cut, crash, chasm,
Flush, gnashing, quivering—and where ends the spasm? (p. 14.)
Where, indeeed ! The Spasmodic School, this, with a vengeance. But again, list, list, oh list!—
How foams my mouth! How cold my forehead steams!
How shrill my ever tingling ears resound
The cleaver's clanking! (p. 15.)
That cleaver's clanking will be the death of us, as it was of so many thousands in the era of the tragedy, with its running accompaniment of swoop, cut, crash, clink, chasm, flush, flash, gnash, spasm, and gurgle. But once more hark ye, my masters—
Furies that round the scaffold hoot and hymn;
The staggering stairs, the plank, the basket's brim;
The shrinking neck beneath the glittering rafter;
The loosened swoop, the clank, cut, crash, &c. (p. 182–3.)
Robespierre the younger is thus pictured, en route to the guillotine—
The tyrant's brother, flower of broken stalk,
Borne up by guards, has reached the bloody balk.
The headsmen lift him to the mark. They gird,
They bend, push, plant him. Now! clink! flash! &c. (p. 258.)
While Robespierre's own appearance on the same platform is thus pictured—
Foretasting pangs for ever to be wreaked,
He startled at the abyss's brink, and shrieked,
And hailed, agape with horror and surprise,
The unquenchable flame, and worm that never dies. …
One hangman holds the head up, by its hairs—
Heavens! how it scowls,it gnashes, and it glares. (p. 261.)
But all this scenery from the shambles is parenthetical: we close the parenthesis, and proceed with our elegant extracts from the Q. C .'s teeming stores of imagery.) St. Just thus deals with a similitude borrowed from the drought parched steppes of Asia:
The bare black swamps in death-like silence sleep,
All feet fly far, but reptiles burrow deep.
Till, soon as signs uplift the watery urn,
And dews bid herbs and ruminants return,
The marsh shows fissures—blisters lift their cowl,
Blend a long mound, beasts startle from and howl:
It heaves—explodes—as mud volcanoes spout,
And some vast snake, or crocodile, flings out.
Tallien, feeling himself talkatively-disposed, and altogether wolfish, exclaims—
My tongue has edge,
Wound up and loaden, as their axe's wedge.
Who shall say Mr. Bliss is not original in his ideas and expressions?
