BOOK I

THE EARLY YOUTH OF HENRY ESMOND, UP TO THE TIME OF HIS LEAVING TRINITY
COLLEGE, IN CAMBRIDGE.


The actors in the old tragedies, as we read, piped their iambics to
a tune, speaking from under a mask, and wearing stilts and a great
head-dress. 'Twas thought the dignity of the Tragic Muse required these
appurtenances, and that she was not to move except to a measure and
cadence. So Queen Medea slew her children to a slow music: and King
Agamemnon perished in a dying fall (to use Mr. Dryden's words): the
Chorus standing by in a set attitude, and rhythmically and decorously
bewailing the fates of those great crowned persons. The Muse of History
hath encumbered herself with ceremony as well as her Sister of the
Theatre. She too wears the mask and the cothurnus, and speaks to
measure. She too, in our age, busies herself with the affairs only of
kings; waiting on them obsequiously and stately, as if she were but a
mistress of court ceremonies, and had nothing to do with the registering
of the affairs of the common people. I have seen in his very old age and
decrepitude the old French King Lewis the Fourteenth, the type and
model of kinghood--who never moved but to measure, who lived and died
according to the laws of his Court-marshal, persisting in enacting
through life the part of Hero; and, divested of poetry, this was but a
little wrinkled old man, pock-marked, and with a great periwig and red
heels to make him look tall--a hero for a book if you like, or for a
brass statue or a painted ceiling, a god in a Roman shape, but what