But the amusing
feature in M. Michelet's reproach is the way in which he _improves_
and varies against us the charge of running, as if he were singing a
catch. Listen to him: They "_showed their backs_" did these
English. (Hip, hip, hurrah! three times three!) "_Behind good walls
they let themselves be taken_." (Hip, hip! nine times nine!) They
"_ran as fast as their legs could carry them_" (Hurrah! twenty-
seven times twenty-seven!) They "_ran before a girl_"; they did.
(Hurrah! eighty-one times eighty-one!) This reminds one of criminal
indictments on the old model in English courts, where (for fear the
prisoner should escape) the crown lawyer varied the charge perhaps
through forty counts. The law laid its guns so as to rake the accused
at every possible angle. While the indictment was reading, he seemed a
monster of crime in his own eyes; and yet, after all, the poor fellow
had but committed one offence, and not always _that_. N. B.--Not
having the French original at hand, I make my quotations from a
friend's copy of Mr. Walter Kelly's translation; which seems to me
faithful, spirited, and idiomatically English--liable, in fact, only to
the single reproach of occasional provincialisms.]
The circumstantial incidents of the execution, unless with more space
than I can now command, I should be unwilling to relate.
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