Page:Hazlitt, Political Essays (1819).djvu/212

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fumes and slow poisons, with her love-powders and the assassin's knife placed side by side! What treacheries and lies upon her tongue! What meanness and malice in her heart! What an old hypocritical hag it is! What a vile canting, mumbling, mischievous witch! "Pah! and smells so." The very wind that kisses all it meets, stops the nose at her. We wonder how any prince should take a fancy to such an old rotten demirep! Yet this is the heroine of all heroines (Mr. Southey will tell you in hobbling illegitimate verse), a greater heroine than even his Joan of Arc—the heroine of Leipsic, of Saragossa, and of Waterloo! It is indeed the same. Look at her again, look at her well, look at her closely, and you will find that it is "that harlot old,"

"The same that was, that is, and is to be;"—

the mother of abominations, the daughter of lies. Dig up the bones of a few of her wretched favourites you may, in Carmelite dresses or any other trumpery; but can you dig up the bones of the men that she has murdered, from the earliest time? can you collect the blood of the millions of men that she has sacrificed in the last twenty-five years alone, and pour it into the Thames, while our merchant-men ride freighted with gold upon the gory stream, and the Editor of The Times (without being called to account for it) applauds with the "sweet thunder" of his pen the proud balance of our exports and our imports, blood and gold? or can you collect the sighs and dried-up tears of wretches that she, Legitimacy, has doomed to pine without a cause in dungeons, to prove that she is the dread sovereign of the human heart? or the groans and shrieks of victims stretched on the rack, or consumed by slow fire, to prove that the minds of men belong to her? or the cries of hunger and pinching cold, the sweat, the rags, the diseases, the emaciated wan looks, by which she proves that the bodies of men are her's? or can you conjure up the wide spreading desolation which she breathes from her nostrils, the famine and pestilence which she scatters before her for her sport and wantonness, the ruins of cities and of countries which she makes her