not ruling at all; they had merely got on the attributes and
clothes of rulers, and were surreptitiously drawing the wages,
while the work remained undone? The Kings were Sham-Kings,
play-acting as at Drury Lane;--and what were the people withal
that took them for real?

It is probably the hugest disclosure of _falsity_ in human
things that was ever at one time made. These reverend
Dignitaries that sat amid their far-shining symbols and
long-sounding long-admitted professions, were mere Impostors,
then? Not a true thing they were doing, but a false thing. The
story they told men was a cunningly devised fable; the gospels
they preached to them were not an account of man's real position
in this world, but an incoherent fabrication, of dead ghosts and
unborn shadows, of traditions, cants, indolences, cowardices,--a
falsity of falsities, which at last _ceases_ to stick together.
Wilfully and against their will, these high units of mankind were
cheats, then; and the low millions who believed in them were
dupes,--a kind of _inverse_ cheats, too, or they would not have
believed in them so long. A universal _Bankruptcy of
Imposture_; that may be the brief definition of it. Imposture
everywhere declared once more to be contrary to Nature; nobody
will change its word into an act any farther:--fallen insolvent;
unable to keep its head up by these false pretences, or make its
pot boil any more for the present! A more scandalous phenomenon,
wide as Europe, never afflicted the face of the sun. Bankruptcy
everywhere; foul ignominy, and the abomination of desolation, in
all high places: odious to look upon, as the carnage of a
battle-field on the morrow morning;--a massacre not of the
innocents; we cannot call it a massacre of the innocents; but a