and told of the godlike courage of the Greek and Trojan
as they fought for her, from the Scamander to the sea.
While the ignorant, the bigoted and intolerant are
rejoicing in his death and garnishing his grave with the slime
of their slander, they may be assured that his name and
writings will live until the English language dies, and
when W. C. Brann is dead and forgotten, so will be
Sterne, Smollet, Fielding, Swift, Pope, Steele, Addison,
Goldsmith, Shakespeare, Ben and Sam Johnson, Byron,
Shelley, Keats, Carlyle, George Eliot and all that mighty
host that have made the English language what it is. The
language that the little tribe of the Angles brought from
the forest of Germany to Britain swallowed the Britain,
and survived the Norman conquest, and then absorbed
both the conqueror and his language. And in the dead
centuries of over a thousand years, in every generation
has produced some mighty intellect to speed it on in building
up the bulwarks of human rights and human liberty,
until they have grown so high that despots turn from
it with loathing, and slaves cannot speak it. The language
of the Magna Charta and the Declaration of American
Independence, the two instruments that have spread the
bread of liberty before a hungry world. And as a writer
of this language, with all its mighty past and greater
future. W. C. Brann had few equals and no superiors.

I have been asked, both before and since his death,
what were his religious opinions, and while every man's
religious opinions are his own, and no one has the right
to question them, I will say he was a Deist something after