Mr. Grote's rehabilitation of the Greek sophists
is a miracle of ingenuity and sense, and does as much honor to the man
who wrote it as justice to the men of whom it is written.
Of the doubtful characters of history, royal families have furnished
not a few, some of whom have stood in as bad positions as those which
have been assigned to Robespierre and his immediate associates.
Catharine de' Medici and Mary I. of England, the "Bloody Mary" of
anti-Catholic localities, are supposed to be models of evil, to be in
crinoline; but if you can believe Eugenio Alberi, Catharine was not the
harlot, the tyrant, the poisoner, the bigot, and the son-killer that
she passes for in the common estimation, and he has made out a capital
defence for the dead woman whom he selected as his client. The Massacre
of St. Bartholomew was not an "Italian crime," but a French _coup
d'etat_, and was as rough and coarse as some similar transactions
seen by our grandfathers, say the September prison-business at Paris in
1792. As to Mary Tudor, she was an excellent woman, but a bigot; and if
she did turn Mrs. Rogers and her eleven children out to the untender
mercies of a cold world, by sending Mr. Rogers into a hot fire, it was
only that souls might be saved from a hotter and a huger fire,--a sort
of argument the force of which we always have been unable to
appreciate, no doubt because we are of the heretics, and never believed
that persons belonging to our determination ought to be roasted.
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