of the free, though ally of the despotic; the abettor of tyranny, but the
shelter of its victims!" Riego answered, with the same faint and
dejected tone, "I care not now what becomes of me! I have lived solely
for Freedom; I have made her my mistress, my hope, my dream: I have no
existence but in her. With the last effort of my country let me perish
also! I have lived to view liberty not only defeated, but derided: I
have seen its efforts not aided, but mocked. In my own country, those
only, who wore it, have been respected who used it as a covering to
ambition. In other nations, the free stood aloof when the charter of
their own rights was violated in the invasion of ours. I cannot forget
that the senate of that England, where you promise me a home, rang with
insulting plaudits when her statesman breathed his ridicule on our
weakness, not his sympathy for our cause; and I--fanatic--dreamer--
enthusiast, as I may be called, whose whole life has been one unremitting
struggle for the opinion I have adopted, am at least not so blinded by my
infatuation, but I can see the mockery it incurs. If I die on the
scaffold to-morrow, I shall have nothing of martyrdom but its doom; not
the triumph--the incense--the immortality of popular applause: I should
have no hope to support me at such a moment, gleaned from the glories of
the future--nothing but one stern and prophetic conviction of the vanity
of that tyranny by which my sentence will be pronounced." Riego paused
for a moment before he resumed, and his pale and death-like countenance
received an awful and unnatural light from the intensity of the feeling
that swelled and burned within him. His figure was drawn up to its full
height, and his voice rang through the lonely hills with a deep and
hollow sound, that had in it a tone of prophecy, as he resumed "It is in
vain that they oppose OPINION; anything else they may subdue. They may
conquer wind, water, nature itself; but to the progress of that secret,
subtle, pervading spirit, their imagination can devise, their strength
can accomplish, no bar: its votaries they may seize, they may destroy;