The Second Funeral of Napoleon
Page: 2

As for those Greeks and Romans whom you have read of in "sheepskin,"
were you to know really what those monsters were, you would blush
all over as red as a hollyhock, and put down the history-book in a
fury. Many of our English worthies are no better. You are not in a
situation to know the real characters of any one of them. They
appear before you in their public capacities, but the individuals
you know not. Suppose, for instance, your mamma had purchased her
tea in the Borough from a grocer living there by the name of
Greenacre: suppose you had been asked out to dinner, and the
gentleman of the house had said: "Ho! Francois! a glass of champagne
for Miss Smith;"--Courvoisier would have served you just as any
other footman would; you would never have known that there was
anything extraordinary in these individuals, but would have thought
of them only in their respective public characters of Grocer and
Footman. This, Madam, is History, in which a man always appears
dealing with the world in his apron, or his laced livery, but which
has not the power or the leisure, or, perhaps, is too high and
mighty to condescend to follow and study him in his privacy. Ah, my
dear, when big and little men come to be measured rightly, and great
and small actions to be weighed properly, and people to be stripped
of their royal robes, beggars' rags, generals' uniforms, seedy out-
at-elbowed coats, and the like--or the contrary say, when souls come
to be stripped of their wicked deceiving bodies, and turned out
stark naked as they were before they were born--what a strange
startling sight shall we see, and what a pretty figure shall some of
us cut! Fancy how we shall see Pride, with his Stultz clothes and
padding pulled off, and dwindled down to a forked radish! Fancy
some Angelic Virtue, whose white raiment is suddenly whisked over
his head, showing us cloven feet and a tail! Fancy Humility, eased
of its sad load of cares and want and scorn, walking up to the very
highest place of all, and blushing as he takes it! Fancy,--but we
must not fancy such a scene at all, which would be an outrage on
public decency. Should we be any better than our neighbors? No,