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all men seen their infant burned to ashes before weep before you in peace; the kindest act of their eyes?

Essex. Gracious God! Merciful Father! what is this?

Spenser. Burned alive! burned to ashes! burned to ashes! The flames dart their serpent tongues through the nursery-window. I can not quit thee, my Elizabeth! I can not lay down our Edmund. Oh these flames! they persecute, they enthrall me, they curl round my temples, they hiss upon my brain, they taunt me with their fierce foul voices, they carp at me, they wither me, they consume me, throwing back to me a little of life, to roll and suffer in, with their fangs upon me. Ask me, my lord, the things you wish to know from me; I may answer them; I am now composed again. Command me, my gracious lord! I would yet serve you; soon I shall be unable. You have stooped to raise me up; you have borne with me; you have pitied me, even like one not powerful; you have brought comfort, and will leave it with me; for gratitude is comfort.

Oh! my memory stands all a tip-toe on one burning point when it drops from it, then it perishes. Spare me: ask me nothing; let me

greatness.

Essex. I should rather have dared to mount into the midst of the conflagration than I now dare intreat thee not to weep. The tears that overflow thy heart, my Spenser, will staunch and heal it in their sacred stream, but not without hope in God.

Spenser. My hope in God is that I may soon see again what he has taken from me. Amid the myriads of angels there is not one so beautiful: and even he (if there be any) who is appointed my guardian, could never love me so. Ah! these are idle thoughts, vain wanderings, distempered dreams. If there ever were guardian angels, he who so wanted one, my helpless boy, would not have left these arms upon my knees.

Essex. God help and sustain thee, too gentle Spenser! I never will desert thee. But what am I? Great they have called me! Alas, how powerless then and infantile is greatness in the presence of calamity!

Come, give me thy hand: let us walk up and down the gallery. Bravely done! I will envy no more a Sidney or a Raleigh.

MARSHAL BUGEAUD AND ARAB CHIEFTAIN.

Bugeaud. Such is the chastisement the God of battles in his justice and indignation has inflicted on you. Of seven hundred refractory and rebellious, who took refuge in the caverns, thirty, and thirty only, are alive and of these thirty there are four only who are capable of labour, or indeed of motion. Thy advanced age ought to have rendered thee wiser, even if my proclamation, dictated from above in the pure spirit of humanity and fraternity, had not been issued. Is thy tongue scorched, that thou listenest and starest and scowlest, without answering me? What mercy after this obstinacy can thy tribe expect?

Arab. None; even if it lived. Nothing is now wanting to complete the glory of France. Mothers and children, in her own land, hath she butchered on the scaffold mothers and children in her own land hath she bound together and cast into the deep: mothers and children in her own land hath she stabbed in the streets, in the prisons, in the temples. Ferocity such as no tales record, no lover of the marvellous and of the horrible could listen to or endure! In every country she has repeated the same atrocities, unexampled by the most sanguinary of the Infidels. To consume the helpless with fire, for the crime of flying from pollution and persecution, was wanting to her glory: She has won it. We are not indeed her children; we are not even her allies; this, and this alone, may, to her modesty, leave it incomplete.

Bugeaud. Traitor! I never ordered the conflagration.

Arab. Certainly thou didst not forbid it: and, when I consider the falsehood of thy people, I dis

believe thy assertion, even though thou hast not sworn it.

Bugeaud. Miscreant! disbelieve, doubt a moment, the word of a Frenchman!

Arab. Was it not the word of a Frenchman that no conquest should be made of this country? Was it not the word of a Frenchman that when chastisement had been inflicted on the Dey of Algiers, even the Algerines should be unmolested? Was it not the word of two kings, repeated by their ministers to every nation round? But we never were Algerines, and never fought for them. Was it not the word of a Frenchman which promised liberty and independence to every nation upon earth. Of all who believed in it, is there one with which it has not been broken? Perfidy and insolence brought down on your nation the vengeance of all others. Simultaneously a just indignation burst forth from every quarter of the earth against it, for there existed no people within its reach or influence who had not suffered by its deceptions.

Bugeaud. At least you Arabs have not been deceived by us. I promised you the vengeance of heaven; and it has befallen you.

Arab. The storm hath swept our country, and still sweeps it. But wait. The course of pestilence is from south to north. The chastisement that overtook you thirty years ago, turus back again to consummate its imperfect and needful work. Impossible that the rulers of Europe, whoever or whatever they are, should be so torpid to honour, so deaf to humanity, as to suffer in the midst of them a people so full of lies and treachery,

so sportive in cruelty, so insensible to shame. If they are, God's armoury contains heavier and sharper and surer instruments. A brave and just man, inflexible, unconquerable, Abdul Kader, will never abandon our cause. Every child of Islam, near and far, roused by the conflagration in the cavern, will rush forward to exterminate the heartless murderers.

Bugeaud. A Frenchman hears no threat without resenting it: his honour forbids him.

Arab. That honour which never has forbidden him to break an engagement or an oath that honour which binds him to remain and to devastate the country he swore before all nations he would leave in peace: that honour which impels him to burn our harvests, to seize our cattle, to murder our youths, to violate our women. Europe has long experienced this honour: we Arabs have learned it perfectly in much less time.

Bugeaud. Guards! seize this mad chatterer. Go, thief! assassin! traitor! blind grey-beard! lame beggar!

Arab. Cease there. Thou canst never make me beg, for bread, for water, or for life. My grey beard is from God: my blindness and lameness are from thee.

Bugeaud. Begone, reptile! Expect full justice; no mercy. The president of my military tribunal will read to thee what is written.

Arab. Go; enter; and sing and whistle in the cavern, where the bones of brave men are never to bleach, are never to decay. Go, where the mother and infant are inseparable for ever; one mass of charcoal; the breasts that gave life, the lips that received it; all, all; save only where two arms, in colour and hardness like corroded iron, cling round a brittle stem, shrunken, warped, and

P. SCIPIO EMILIANUS, Scipio. Polybius, if you have found me slow in rising to you, if I lifted not up my eyes to salute you on your entrance, do not hold me ungrateful.. proud there is no danger that you will ever call me this day of all days would least make me so it shows me the power of the immortal gods, the mutability of fortune, the instability of empire, the feebleness, the nothingness, of man. The earth stands motionless; the grass upon it bends and returns, the same to-day as yesterday, the same in this age as in a hundred past; the sky darkens and is serene again; the clouds melt away, but they are clouds another time, and float like triumphal pageants along the heavens. Carthage is fallen! to rise no more! the funereal horns have this hour announced to us, that, after eighteen days and eighteen nights of conflagration, her last embers are extinguished. Polybius. Perhaps, O Æmilianus, I ought not

to have come in.

Scipio. Welcome, my friend.

Polybius. While you were speaking I would by no means interrupt you so idly, as to ask you to

where two heads are calcined. Go; strike now; strike bravely: let thy sword in its playfulness ring against them. What are they but white stones, under an arch of black; the work of thy creation! Bugeaud. Singed porcupine! thy quills are blunted, and stick only into thyself.

Arab. Is it not in the memory of our elders, and I will it not remain in the memory of all generations, that, when four thousand of those who spoke our language and obeyed our Prophet, were promised peace and freedom on laying down their arms, in the land of Syria, all, to a man, were slain under the eyes of your leader? Is it not notorious that this perfidious and sanguinary wretch is the very man whom, above all others, the best of you glory in imitating, and whom you rejected only when fortune had forsaken him? It is then only that atrocious crimes are visible or looked for in your country. Even this last massacre, no doubt, will find defenders and admirers there; but neither in Africa nor in Asia, nor in Europe, one. Many of you will palliate it, many of you will deny it: for it is the custom of your country to cover blood with lies, and lies with blood.

Bugeaud. And, here and there, a sprinkling of ashes over both, it seems.

Arab. Ending in merriment, as befits ye. But is it ended?

Bugeaud. Yes, yes, at least for thee, vile prowler, traitor, fugitive, incendiary! And thou too, singed porcupine, canst laugh!

Arab. At thy threats and stamps and screams. Verily our Prophet did well and with farsightedness, in forbidding the human form and features to be graven or depicted, if such be human. Henceforward will monkeys and hyænas abhor the resemblance and disclaim the relationship.*

POLYBIUS, PANÆTIUS. whom you have been proud, or to whom could you be ungrateful.

Scipio. To him, if to any, whose hand is in mine; to him on whose shoulder I rest my head, weary with presages and vigils. Collect my thoughts for me, O my friend! the fall of Carthage hath shaken and scattered them. There are moments when, if we are quite contented with ourselves, we never can remount to what we were before.

Polybius. Panætius is absent.

Scipio. Feeling the necessity, at the moment, of utter loneliness, I despatched him toward the city. There may be (yes, even there) some sufferings which the Senate would not censure us for assuaging. But behold he returns! We were speaking of you, Panatius !

Panatius. And about what beside? Come, honestly tell me, Polybius, on what are you re

* Sismondi relates a similar massacre by the French in the caverns of Masaro, near Vicenza, in which six thousand perished. Vol. 14, p. 47.

flecting and meditating with such sedately intense | perished, drew them thitherward. Such were the enthusiasm ?

Polybius. After the burning of some village, or the overleaping of some garden-wall, to exterminate a few pirates or highwaymen, I have seen the commander's tent thronged with officers; I have heard as many trumpets around him as would have shaken down the places of themselves; I have seen the horses start from the pretorium, as if they would fly from under their trappings, and spurred as if they were to reach the east and west before sunset, that nations might hear of the exploit, and sleep soundly. And now do I behold in solitude, almost in gloom, and in such silence that, unless my voice prevents it, the grasshopper is audible, him who has levelled to the earth the strongest and most populous of cities, the wealthiest and most formidable of empires. I had seen Rome; I had seen (what those who never saw never will see) Carthage; I thought I had seen Scipio: it was but the image of him here I find him.

:

Scipio. There are many hearts that ache this day there are many that never will ache more hath one man done it? one man's breath? What air, upon the earth, or upon the waters, or in the void of heaven, is lost so quickly! it flies away at the point of an arrow, and returns no more! the sea-foam stifles it! the tooth of a reptile stops it! a noxious leaf suppresses it What are we in our greatness? whence rises it? whither tends it? Merciful gods! may not Rome be what Carthage is? may not those who love her devotedly, those who will look on her with fondness and affection after life, see her in such condition as to wish she were so?

Polybius. One of the heaviest groans over fallen Carthage, burst from the breast of Scipio: who would believe this tale?

Scipio. Men like my Polybius: others must never hear it.

Polybius. You have not ridden forth, Æmilianus, to survey the ruins.

dismal sights and sounds, a fresh city seemed to have been taken every hour, for seventeen days. This is the eighteenth since the smoke arose from the level roofs and from the lofty temples, and thousands died, and tens of thousands ran in search of death.

Calamity moves me; heroism moves me more. That a nation whose avarice we have so often reprehended, should have cast into the furnace gold and silver, from the insufficiency of brass and iron for arms; that palaces the most magnificent should have been demolished by the proprietor for their beams and rafters, in order to build a fleet against us; that the ropes whereby the slaves hauled them down to the new harbour, should in part be composed of hair, for one lock of which kings would have laid down their diadems; that Asdrubal should have found equals, his wife none my mind, my very limbs, are unsteady with admiration.

O Liberty! what art thou to the valiant and brave, when thou art thus to the weak and timid! dearer than life, stronger than death, higher than purest love. Never will I call upon thee where thy name can be profaned, and never shall my soul acknowledge a more exalted power than thee.

Panatius. The Carthaginians and Moors have, beyond other nations, a delicate feeling on female chastity. Rather than that their women should become slaves and concubines, they slay them: is it certain that Asdrubal did not observe or cause to be observed, the custom of his country?

Polybius. Certain on the surrender of his army his wife threw herself and her two infants into the flames. Not only memorable acts, of what the dastardly will call desperation, were performed, but some also of deliberate and signal justice. Avaricious as we called the people, and unjustly, as you have proved, Emilianus, I will relate what I myself was witness to.

In a part of the city where the fire had subScipio. No, Polybius: since I removed my sided, we were excited by loud cries, rather of tent to avoid the heat from the conflagration, I indignation, we thought, than of such as fear or never have ridden nor walked nor looked toward lament or threaten or exhort; and we pressed them. At this elevation, and three miles off, the forward to disperse the multitude. Our horses temperature of the season is altered. I do not often plunged in the soft dust, and in the holes believe, as those about me would have persuaded whence the pavement had been removed for misme, that the gods were visible in the clouds; that siles, and often reared up and snorted violently thrones of ebony and gold were scattered in all at smells which we could not perceive, but which directions; that broken chariots, and flaming we discovered to rise from bodies, mutilated steeds, and brazen bridges, had cast their frag- and half-burnt, of soldiers and horses, laid bare, ments upon the earth; that eagles and lions, dol- some partly, some wholly, by the march of the phins and tridents, and other emblems of power troop. Although the distance from the place and empire, were visible at one moment, and at whence we parted to that where we heard the the next had vanished; that purple and scarlet cries, was very short, yet from the incumbrances overspread the mansions of the gods; that their in that street, and from the dust and smoke voices were heard at first confusedly and discord-issuing out of others, we were some time before antly; and that the apparition closed with their we reached it. On our near approach, two old high festivals. I could not keep my eyes on the heavens a crash of arch or of theatre or of tower, a column of flame rising higher than they were, or a universal cry, as if none until then had

men threw themselves on the ground before us, and the elder spake thus. "Our age, O Romans, neither will nor ought to be our protection: we are, or rather we have been, judges of this land;

and to the uttermost of our power we have invited | live," said he.
our countrymen to resist you. The laws are now
yours."

The expectation of the people was intense and silent we had heard some groans; and now the last words of the old man were taken up by others, by men in agony.

"Yes, O Romans!" said the elder who accompanied him that had addressed us, "the laws are yours; and none punish more severely than you do treason and parricide. Let your horses turn this corner, and you will see before you traitors and parricides."

We entered a small square: it had been a market-place: the roofs of the stalls were demolished, and the stones of several columns, (thrown down to extract the cramps of iron and the lead that fastened them) served for the spectators, male and female to mount on. Five men were nailed on crosses; two others were nailed against a wall, from scarcity (as we were told) of wood.

"Can seven men have murdered their parents in the same year?” cried I.

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"At the first order of the conqueror or the elders, I surrender my spear." "What is your pleasure, O commander ?" said the elder.

"That an act of justice be the last public act performed by the citizens of Carthage, and that the sufferings of these wretches be not abridged."

Such was my reply. The soldiers piled their spears, for the points of which the hearts of the crucified men thirsted; and the people hailed us as they would have hailed deliverers.

Scipio. It is wonderful that a city, in which private men are so wealthy as to furnish the armories of tyrants, should have existed so long, and flourishing in power and freedom.

Panatius. It survived but shortly this flagrant crime in its richer citizens. An admirable form of government, spacious and safe harbours, a fertile soil, a healthy climate, industry and science in agriculture, in which no nation is equal to the Moorish, were the causes of its prosperity: there are many of its decline.

Scipio. Enumerate them, Panatius, with your wonted clearness.

No, nor has any of the seven," replied the first who had spoken. "But when heavy impositions were laid upon those who were backward in voluntary contributions, these men, among the richest in our city, protested by the gods that they had no gold or silver left. They protested truly." "And they die for this! inhuman, insatiable, thus to reason, as if all things around and above inexorable wretch!"

Panatius. We are fond, O my friends! of likening power and greatness to the luminaries of heaven; and we think ourselves quite moderate when we compare the agitations of elevated souls to whatever is highest and strongest on the earth, liable alike to shocks and sufferings, and able alike to survive and overcome them. And truly

"Their books," added he, unmoved at my reproaches, " were seized by public authority and examined. It was discovered that, instead of employing their riches in external or internal commerce, or in manufactories, or in agriculture, instead of reserving it for the embellishment of the city, or the utility of the citizens, instead of lending it on interest to the industrious and the needy, they had lent it to foreign kings and tyrants, some of whom were waging unjust wars by these very means, and others were enslaving their own country. For so heinous a crime the laws had appointed no specific punishment. On such occasions the people and elders vote in what manner the delinquent shall be prosecuted, lest any offender should escape with impunity, from their humanity or improvidence. Some voted that these wretches should be cast amid the panthers; the majority decreed them (I think wisely) a more lingering and more ignominious death."

The men upon the crosses held down their heads, whether from shame or pain or feebleness. The sunbeams were striking them fiercely; sweat ran from them, liquefying the blood that had blackened and hardened on their hands and feet. A soldier stood by the side of each, lowering the point of his spear to the ground; but no one of them gave it up to us. A centurion asked the nearest of them how he dared to stand armed before him.

"Because the city is in ruins, and the laws still

us sympathized, is good both for heart and intellect. I have little or nothing of the poetical in my character; and yet from reading over and considering these similitudes, I am fain to look upon nations with somewhat of the same feeling; and, dropping from the mountains and disentangling myself from the woods and forests, to fancy I see in states what I have seen in cornfields. The green blades rise up vigorously in an inclement season, and the wind itself makes them shine against the sun. There is room enough for all of them; none wounds another by collision or weakens by overtopping it; but, rising and bending simultaneously, they seem equally and mutually supported. No sooner do the ears of corn upon them lie close together in their full maturity, than a slight inundation is enough to cast them down, or a faint blast of wind to shed and scatter them. In Carthage we have seen the powerful families, however discordant among themselves, unite against the popular; and it was only when their lives were at stake that the people co-operated with the senate.

A mercantile democracy may govern long and widely; a mercantile aristocracy can not stand. What people will endure the supremacy of those, uneducated and presumptuous, from whom they buy their mats and faggots, and who receive their money for the most ordinary and vile utensils? If no conqueror enslaves them from abroad, they would, under such disgrace, welcome as their deliverer, and acknowledge as their master, the

citizen most distinguished for his military achieve- | with which our Rome presents but the pent-houses ments. The rich men who were crucified in the of artisans or the sheds of shepherds. With whatweltering wilderness beneath us, would not have ever celerity the messenger fled from Corinth and employed such criminal means of growing richer, arrived here, the particulars must have been known had they never been persuaded to the contrary, at Rome as early, and I shall receive them ere and that enormous wealth would enable them to many days are past. commit another and a more flagitious act of treason against their country, in raising them above the people, and enabling them to become its taxers and oppressors.

Panatius. I hardly know whether we are not less affected at the occurrence of two or three momentous and terrible events, than at one; and whether the gods do not usually place them together in the order of things, that we may be awe-stricken by the former, and reconciled to their decrees by the latter, from an impression of their power. I know not what Babylon may have

O Emilianus! what a costly beacon here hath Rome before her in this awful conflagration: the greatest (I hope) ever to be, until that wherein the world must perish. Polybius. How many Sibylline books are legible been; but I presume that, as in the case of all in yonder embers.

The causes, O Panațius, which you have stated, of Carthage's former most flourishing condition, are also those why a hostile senate hath seen the necessity of her destruction, necessary not only to the dominion, but to the security of Rome. Italy has the fewest and the worst harbours of any country known to us: a third of her soil is sterile, a third of the remainder is pestiferous: and her inhabitants are more addicted to war and rapine than to industry and commerce. To make room for her few merchants on the Adriatic and Ionian seas, she burns Corinth to leave no rival in traffic or in power, she burns Carthage.

Panatius. If the Carthaginians had extended their laws and language over the surrounding states of Africa, which they might have done by moderation and equity, this ruin could not have been effected. Rome has been victorious by having been the first to adopt a liberal policy, which even in war itself is a wise one. The parricides who lent their money to the petty tyrants of other countries, would have found it greatly more advantageous to employ it in cultivation nearer home, and in feeding those as husbandmen whom else they must fear as enemies. So little is the Carthaginian language known, that I doubt whether we shall in our lifetime see anyone translate their annals into Latin or Greek: and within these few days what treasures of antiquity have been irreparably lost! The Romans will repose at citrean* tables for ages, and never know at last perhaps whence the Carthaginians brought their wood.

Scipio. It is an awful thing to close as we have done the history of a people. If the intelligence brought this morning to Polybius be true,† in one year the two most flourishing and most beautiful cities in the world have perished, in comparison

*The trabs citrea is not citron wood as we understand the fruit tree. It was often of great dimensions: it appears from the description of its colour to have been mahogany. The trade to the Atlantic continent and islands must

have been possessed by a company, bound to secrecy by oath and interest. The prodigious price of this wood at Rome proves that it had ceased to be imported, or perhaps found, in the time of Cicero.

+ Corinth in fact was not burnt until some months after

other great Asiatic capitals, the habitations of the people (who are slaves) were wretched, and that the magnificence of the place consisted in the property of the king and priesthood, and in the walls erected for the defence of it. Many streets probably were hardly worth a little bronze cow of Myron, such as a stripling could steal and carry off. The case of Corinth and of Carthage was very different. Wealth overspread the greater part of them, competence and content the whole. Wherever there are despotical governments, poverty and industry dwell together; Shame dogs them in the public walks; Humiliation is among their household gods.

Scipio. I do not remember the overthrow of any two other great cities within so short an interval.

Panatius. I was not thinking so much of cities or their inhabitants, when I began to speak of what a breath of the Gods removes at once from earth. I was recollecting, O Æmilianus, that in one Olympiad the three greatest men that ever appeared together were swept off. What is Babylon, or Corinth, or Carthage, in comparison with these! what would their destruction be, if every hair on the head of every inhabitant had become a man, such as most men are! First in order of removal was, he whose steps you have followed and whose labours you have completed, Africanus: then Philopomen, whose task was more difficult, more complex, more perfect: and lastly Hannibal. What he was you know better than any.

Scipio. Had he been supported by his country, had only his losses been filled up, and skilful engineers sent out to him with machinery and implements for sieges, we should not be discoursing here on what he was: the Roman name had been extinguished.

Polybius. Since Emilianus is as unwilling to blame an enemy as a friend, I take it on myself to censure Hannibal for two things, subject however to the decision of him who has conquered Carthage.

Scipio. The first I anticipate: now what is the second?

Panatius. I would hear both stated and dis

Carthage; but as one success is always followed by the coursed on, although the knowledge will be of

rumour of another, the relation is not improbable.

little use to me.

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