Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing."

But on the contrary, it is in history that the lessons of morality are
delivered with most effect. The priest may provoke our suspicion--the
moralist may fail to work in us any practical conviction; but the
lessons of history are not such as vanish in the fumes of unprofitable
speculation, or which it is possible for us to mistrust, or to deride.
Obscure as the dispensations of Providence often are, it sometimes, to
use Lord Bacon's language--"pleases God, for the confutation of such as
are without God in the world, to write them in such text and capital
letters that he who runneth by may read it--that is, mere sensual
persons which hasten by God's judgments, and never tend or fix their
cogitations upon them, are nevertheless in their passage and race urged
to discern it." In all historical writers, philosophical or trivial,
sacred or profane, from the meagre accounts of the monkish chronicler,
no less than from the pages stamped with all the indignant energy of
Tacitus, gleams forth the light which, amid surrounding gloom and
injustice, amid the apparent triumph of evil, discovers the influence of
that power which the heathens personified as Nemesis. Her tread, indeed,
is often noiseless--her form may be long invisible--but the moment at
length arrives when the measure of forbearance is complete; the echoes
of her step vibrate upon the ear, her form bursts upon the eye, and her
victim--be it a savage tyrant, or a selfish oligarchy, or a hypocritical
church, or a corrupt nation--perishes.

"Come quei che va di notte,
Che porta il lume dietro, _e a se non giova,
Ma dopo se fa le persone dotte_."