Through these orifices the sturdy old man dealt a
good deal of deadly mischief among his assailants, until they broke down
the door by thrusting against it with a ladder, and tumbled headlong in
upon him. I shall not pretend to be an admirer of old John Brown, any
farther than sympathy with Whittier's excellent ballad about him may go;
nor did I expect ever to shrink so unutterably from any apophthegm of a
sage, whose happy lips have uttered a hundred golden sentences, as from
that saying (perhaps falsely attributed to so honored a source), that the
death of this blood-stained fanatic has "made the Gallows as venerable as
the Cross!" Nobody was ever more justly hanged. He won his martyrdom
fairly, and took it firmly. He himself, I am persuaded (such was his
natural integrity), would have acknowledged that Virginia had a right to
take the life which he had staked and lost; although it would have been
better for her, in the hour that is fast coming, if she could generously
have forgotten the criminality of his attempt in its enormous folly. On
the other hand, any common-sensible man, looking at the matter
unsentimentally, must have felt a certain intellectual satisfaction in
seeing him hanged, if it were only in requittal of his preposterous
miscalculation of possibilities.
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