Lines 597-608:  the thoughts we should roll-call, etc.

This passage should be associated in the reader’s mind with the extraordinary variant given in the preceding note, for only a week later Tanagra dust and “our royal hands” were to come together, in real life, in real death.

Had he not fled, our Charles II might have been executed; this would have certainly happened had he been apprehended between the palace and the Rippleson Caves; but he sensed those thick fingers of fate only seldom during his flight; he sensed them feeling for him (as those of a grim old shepherd checking a daughter’s virginity) when he was slipping, that night, on the damp ferny flank of Mt. Mandevil (see note to line 149), and next day, at a more eerie altitude, in the heady blue, where the mountaineer becomes aware of a phantom companion.  Many times that night our King cast himself upon the ground with the desperate resolution of resting there till dawn that he might shift with less torment what hazard soever he ran.  (I am thinking of yet another Charles, another long dark man about two yards high.)  But it was all rather physical, or neurotic, and I know perfectly well that my King, if caught and condemned and led away to be shot, would have behaved as he does in lines 606-608:  thus he would look about him with insolent composure, and thus he would

Taunt our inferiors, cheerfully deride

The dedicated imbeciles and spit

Into their eyes just for the fun of it

Let me close this important note with a rather anti-Darwinian aphorism:  The one who kills is always his victim’s inferior.