What remains but that I blow my brains out, and do at length one true action ?" Which the poor Century did; many thanks to it, in the circumstances.
For there was need once more of a Divine Revelation to the torpid frivolous children of men, if they were not to sink altogether into the ape condition.

And in that whirlwind of the Universe,--lights obliterated, and the torn wrecks of Earth and Hell hurled aloft into the Empyrean; black whirlwind, which made even apes serious, and drove most of them mad,--there was, to men, a voice audible; voice from the heart of things once more, as if to say: "Lying is not permitted in this Universe.

The wages of lying, you behold, are death.

Lying means damnation in this Universe; and Beelzebub, never so elaborately decked in crowns and mitres, is NOT God!" This was a revelation truly to be named of the Eternal, in our poor Eighteenth Century; and has greatly altered the complexion of said Century to the Historian ever since.
Whereby, in short, that Century is quite confiscate, fallen bankrupt, given up to the auctioneers;--Jew-brokers sorting out of it at this moment, in a confused distressing manner, what is still valuable or salable.

And, in fact, it lies massed up in our minds as a disastrous wrecked inanity, not useful to dwell upon; a kind of dusky chaotic background, on which the figures that had some veracity in them--a small company, and ever growing smaller as our demands rise in strictness--are delineated for us.--"And yet it is the Century of our own Grandfathers ?" cries the reader.