It seemed to him, from the top of his nineteen years' experience, as if he were marked at birth to be the perpetrator of some signal action, to set back fallen Mercy, to overthrow the usurping devil that sat, horned and hoofed, on her throne.

Seductive Jacobin figments, which he had often refuted at the Speculative, swam up in his mind and startled him as with voices: and he seemed to himself to walk accompanied by an almost tangible presence of new beliefs and duties.
On the named morning he was at the place of execution.

He saw the fleering rabble, the flinching wretch produced.

He looked on for a while at a certain parody of devotion, which seemed to strip the wretch of his last claim to manhood.

Then followed the brutal instant of extinction, and the paltry dangling of the remains like a broken jumping-jack.