I. SAVAGENESS VI. THE NATURE OF GOTHIC 195

the one are hindered by the burden on his shoulder; of the other by the bridle on his lips: there is no way by which the burden may be lightened; but we need not suffer from the bridle if we do not champ at it. To yield reverence to another, to hold ourselves and our likes at his disposal, is not slavery; often it is the noblest state in which a man can live in this world. There is, indeed, a reverence which is servile, that is to say, irrational or selfish: but there is also noble reverence, that is to say, reasonable and loving; and a man is never so noble as when he is reverent in this kind; nay, even if the feeling pass the bounds of mere reason, so that it be loving, a man is raised by it. Which had, in reality, most of the serf nature in him,-the Irish peasant who was lying in wait yesterday for his landlord, with his musket muzzle thrust through the ragged hedge;¹ or that old mountain servant, who 200 years ago, at Inverkeithing, gave up his own life and the lives of his seven sons for his chief?-as each fell, calling forth his brother to the death, “Another for Hector!”* And therefore, in all ages and all countries, reverence has been paid and sacrifice made by men to each other, not only without complaint, but rejoicingly; and famine, and peril, and sword, and all evil, and all shame, have been borne willingly in the causes of masters and kings; for all these gifts of the heart ennobled the men who gave, not less than the men who received them, and nature prompted, and God rewarded the sacrifice. But to feel their souls withering within them, unthanked, to find their whole being sunk into an unrecognized abyss, to be counted off into a heap of mechanism numbered with its wheels, and weighed with its hammer strokes-this, nature bade not,-this, God blesses not,-this, humanity for no long time is able to endure.

* Vide Preface to Fair Maid of Perth.

¹ [At the time Ruskin wrote, agrarian crime had been prevalent in Ireland. In 1847 a Coercion Act was passed; in 1848 the “Young Ireland” rebellion broke out, and the Habeas Corpus Act was suspended; in 1850 the Irish Tenant-Right League was formed; in the same year “several landlords were murdered by discontented tenants” (see Annual Register for 1850, p. 198.]

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