VII. DIVINE RIGHT 269

thought to have failed in their duty, were in that manner incapacitated from reigning more.

78. An Eastern custom, as we know: grave in judgment; in the perfectness of it, joined with infliction of grievous Sight, before the infliction of grievous blindness; that so the last memory of this world’s light might remain a grief. “And they slew the sons of Zedekiah before his eyes; and put out the eyes of Zedekiah.”¹

Custom I know not how ancient. The sons of Eliab, when Judah was young in her Exodus, like Venice, appealed to it in their fury: “Is it a small thing that thou hast brought us up out of a land that floweth with milk and honey, except thou make thyself altogether a Prince over us; wilt thou put out the eyes of these men?”²

The more wild Western races of Christianity, early Irish and the like,-Norman even, in the pirate times,-inflict the penalty with reckless scorn;* but Venice deliberately, as was her constant way; such her practical law against leaders whom she had found spiritually blind: “These, at least, shall guide no more.”

Very savage! monstrous! if you will; whether it be not a worse savageness deliberately to follow leaders without sight, may be debateable.

79. The Doge whose history I am going to tell you was the last of deposed Kings in the first epoch. Not

* Or sometimes pitifully: “Olaf was by no means an unmerciful man, -much the reverse where he saw good cause. There was a wicked old King Rærik, for example, one of those five kinglets whom, with their bits of armaments, Olaf, by stratagem, had surrounded one night, and at once bagged and subjected when morning rose, all of them consenting;-all of them except this Rærik, whom Olaf, as the readiest sure course, took home with him; blinded, and kept in his own house, finding there was no alternative but that or death to the obstinate old dog, who was a kind of distant cousin withal, and could not conscientiously be killed”-(Carlyle, Early Kings of Norway, p. 121)-conscience, and kin-ship, or “kindliness,” declining somewhat in the Norman heart afterwards.

¹ [Jeremiah lii. 10, 11.]

² [Numbers xvi. 13.]

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