FOOTNOTES
[1] "The only ducal house."—That is, the only one not royal. There are four provinces in Ireland—Ulster, Connaught, Munster, which three give old traditional titles to three personages of the blood royal. Remains only Leinster, which gives the title of duke to the Fitzgeralds.
[2] "Present French king."—Viz., in the year 1833.
[3] "To have pardoned," &c.—This was written under circumstances of great hurry; and, were it not for that palliation, would be inexcusably thoughtless. For, in a double sense, it is doubtful how far the government could have pardoned Lord Edward. First, in a prudential sense, was it possible (except in the spirit of a German sentimentalizing drama) to pardon a conspicuous, and within certain limits a very influential, officer for publicly avowing opinions tending to treason, and at war with the constitutional system of the land which fed him and which claimed his allegiance? Was it possible, in point of prudence or in point of dignity, to overlook such anti-national sentiments, whilst neither disavowed nor ever likely to be disavowed? Was this possible, regard being had to the inevitable effect of such unearned forgiveness upon the army at large? But secondly, in a merely logical sense of practical self-consistency, would it have been rational or even intelligible to pardon a man who probably would not be pardoned; that is, who must (consenting or not consenting) benefit by the concessions of the pardon, whilst disowning all reciprocal obligations?
[4] "For quarter was not granted on either side."—I repeat, as all along and necessarily I have repeated, that which orally I was told at the time, or which subsequently I have read in published accounts. But the reader is aware by this time of my steadfast conviction, that more easily might a camel go through the eye of a needle, than a reporter, fresh from a campaign blazing with partisanship, and that partisanship representing ancient and hereditary feuds, could by possibility cleanse himself from the virus of such a prejudice.
[5] The same jest was applied to Mr. Pitt's brother. When first lord of the Admiralty, people calling on him as late as even 10 or 11, P.M., were told that his lordship was riding in the park. On this account, partly, but more pointedly with a malicious reference to the contrast between his languor and the fiery activity of his father, the first earl, he was jocularly called, the late Lord Chatham.
[6] Perhaps also not. Possibly enough there may be no call for any such exceptional solution; for, after all, there may be nothing to solve—no dignus vindice nodus. As regards the sudden interchange of characters on the scaffold,—the constitutionally brave man all at once becoming timid, and the timid man becoming brave,—it must be remembered, that the particular sort of courage applicable to duelling, when the danger is much more of a fugitive and momentary order than that which invests a battle lasting for hours, depends almost entirely upon a man's confidence in his own luck—a peculiarity of mind which exists altogether apart from native resources of courage, whether moral or physical: usually this mode of courage is but a transformed expression for a sanguine temperament. A man who is habitually depressed by a constitutional taint of despondency may carry into a duel a sublime principle of calm, self-sacrificing courage, as being possibly utterly without hope—a courage, therefore, which has to fight with internal resistance, to which there may be nothing corresponding in a cheerful temperament.
But there is another and separate agency through which the fear of death may happen to act as a disturbing force, and most irregularly as viewed in relation to moral courage and strength of mind. This anomalous force is the imaginative and shadowy terror with which different minds recoil from death—not considered as an agony or torment, but considered as a mystery, and, next after God, as the most infinite of mysteries. In a brave man this terror may happen to be strong; in a pusillanimous man, simply through inertness and original feebleness of imagination, may happen to be scarcely developed. This oscillation of horror, alternating between death as an agony and death as a mystery, not only exists with a corresponding set of consequences accordingly as one or other prevails, but is sometimes consciously contemplated and put into the scales of comparison and counter valuation. For instance, one of the early Csesars reviewed the case thus: "Emori nolo; me esse mortuum nihil cestumo: From death as the act and process of dying, I revolt; but as to death, viewed as a permanent state or condition, I don't value it at a straw." What this particular Caesar detested, and viewed with burning malice, was death the agony—death the physical torment. As to death the mystery, want of sensibility to the infinite and the shadowy had disarmed that of its terrors for him. Yet, on the contrary, how many are there who face the mere physical anguish of dying with stern indifference! But death the mystery,—death that, not satisfied with changing our objective, may attack even the roots of our subjective,—there lies the mute, ineffable, voiceless horror before which all human courage is abashed, even as all human resistance becomes childish when measuring itself against gravitation.
[7] "Not yet altogether obsolete."—Written in 1833.