Part 64

```Dragging the world into eternity!”=

If there be any one line in this passage about which we are more in the dark than about the rest, it is the fourth. What the difference may be between the victims and the martyrs, and why the martyrs are to lie before Death, and the victims behind him, are to us great mysteries.

We now come to the third part, of which we may say with honest Cassio, “Why, this is a more excellent song than the other.” Mr. Robert Montgomery is very severe on the infidels, and undertakes to prove, that, as he elegantly expresses it,=

```“One great Enchanter helm’d the harmonious whole.”=

What an enchanter has to do with helming, or what a helm has to do with harmony, he does not explain. He proceeds with his argument thus:=

```“And dare men dream that dismal Chance has framed

```All that the eye perceives, or tongue has named

```The spacious world, and all its wonders, born

```Designless, self-created, and forlorn;

```Like to the flashing bubbles on a stream,

```Fire from the cloud, or phantom in a dream?”=

We should be sorry to stake our faith in a higher Power on Mr. Robert Montgomery’s logic. He informs us that lightning is designless and self-created. If he can believe this, we cannot conceive why he may not believe that the whole universe is designless and self-created. A few lines before, he tells us that it is the Deity who bids “thunder rattle from the skiey deep.” His theory is therefore this, that God made the thunder, but that the lightning made itself.

But Mr. Robert Montgomery’s metaphysics are not at present our game. He proceeds to set forth the fearful effects of Atheism=

```“Then, blood-stain’d Murder, bare thy hideous arm

```And thou, Rebellion, welter in thy storm:

```Awake, ye spirits of avenging crime;

```Burst from your bonds, and battle with the time!”=

Mr. Robert Montgomery is fond of personification, and belongs, we need not say, to that school of poets who hold that nothing more is necessary to a personification in poetry than to begin a word with a capital letter. Murder may, without impropriety, bare her arm, as she did long ago, in Mr. Campbell’s Pleasures of Hope. But what possible motive Rebellion can have for weltering in her storm, what avenging crime may be, who its spirits may be, why they should be burst from their bonds, what their bonds may be, why they should battle with the time, what the time may be, and what a battle between the time and the spirits of avenging crime would resemble, we must confess ourselves quite unable to understand.=

```“And here let Memory turn her tearful glance

```On the dark horrors of tumultuous France,

```When blood and blasphemy defiled her land,

```And fierce Rebellion shook her savage hand.”=

Whether Rebellion shakes her own hand, shakes the hand of Memory, or shakes the hand of France, or what any one of these three metaphors would mean, we, know no more than we know what is the sense of the following passage=

```“Let the foul orgies of infuriate crime

```Picture the raging havoc of that time,

```When leagued Rebellion march’d to kindle man,

```Fright in her rear, and Murder in her van.

```And thou, sweet flower of Austria, slaughter’d Queen,