Chiswick Press:
Charles Whittingham and Co.,
Tooks Court, London.
THE ISLAND OF
ANARCHY.
Chapter I.
“As for my particular, I am verily perswaded, that since that age (thirtie yeares), both my spirit and my body have more decreased than encreased, more recoyled than advanced. It may be that knowledge and experience shall encrease in them, together with life, that bestow their time well: but vivacitie, promptitude, constancie, and other parts much more our owne, more important, and more essentiall, they droope, they languish, and they faint.”—Montaigne (Florio’s translation).
The ending of the nineteenth century, like that of the eighteenth, was a time of terrible and strange things, as if it were coming to be the law of human affairs that the sunsets of the centuries should be red with a “Terror” and dark with despair.
In England—then, as in the past, the refuge of banished men—social disorder reached a height that would soon have driven all her quiet dwellers to seek more peaceful homes on the other side of the globe, had not a new and strange thing changed the whole aspect of affairs.