by his fulness of fellowship in their fatigues and privations. Such example is very telling, very taking, with rank and file. When Shakspeare's Harry the Fifth, at Agincourt, bids good morrow in the camp to old Sir Thomas Erpingham, but suggests, with kindly consideration for age, that a good soft pillow for that good white head were better than a churlish turf of France, "Not so, my liege," the cheery veteran replies; "this lodging likes me better, since I may say, Now lie I like a king." Like the king, his king. It is of a later king of England that, in another play of Shakspeare's, the note of interrogation is put,—and it is a note of admiration too,

“... But why commands the king

That his chief followers lodge in towns about him,
While he himself keepeth in the cold field ?"

EZEBEL shines in her very wickedness beside the weaker wickedness of her hesitating husband, Ahab. She is every inch of her a bad queen; while he, as a byword among bad kings, is yet a poor creature after all. She can will resolutely, and carry out her will unflinchingly; which he can not. Of her one is reminded by the Carathis in Vathek: "This princess was so far from being influenced by scruples, that she was as wicked as woman could be; which is not saying a little, for the sex pique themselves on their superiority in every competition." Even in the hall of Eblis, nothing appals the dauntless soul of Carathis; and Eblis himself welcomes her as a princess whose knowledge and whose crimes have merited a conspicuous rank in his empire. Jezebel, as posterity reads and accepts her character in Scripture, has her historical types in such perversions of womanhood as Gibbon depicts in the wife of Gallus, the Empress Constantina,-though she, indeed, is described as not a woman, but one of the infernal furies,

CHARACTER OF KING AHAB.

189

tormented with an insatiate thirst of human blood; instead of employing her influence to insinuate the mild counsels of prudence and humanity, she exasperated the fierce passions of her husband; and as she, in genuine Gibbonese, "retained the vanity, though she had renounced the gentleness of her sex," a pearl necklace was esteemed an equivalent price for the murder of an innocent and virtuous nobleman. Worthy to rank with her, and yet above her, was the famous Brunehautagainst the vices of whose court Columban had to wage a noble strife, in the spirit of Elijah against Jezebel. Brunehaut is described by Milman as ruling the young king Thierri, of Burgundy, through his vices; and as ruling her grandson's realm by the ascendency of that strong and unscrupulous mind which for above forty years had raised her into a rival of that most famous, or infamous, Fredegonde, her rival in the number of her paramours and the number of murders which she had perpetrated. To Jezebel she may be compared even in the piecemeal disposal of her remains, for, exposed on a camel to the derision of the camp of her enemy, King Clotaire, Brunehaut was tied to the tail of a wild horse, and literally torn to shreds.* Of Ahab Dr. Chalmers cannot but think, that, with all his wickedness, he had a certain susceptibility or facility of temperament, which somewhat serves to abate our indignation against him. His mild treatment of Elijah, and his yielding compassion for Benhadad, are quoted as instances. The heaviness or dejection of spirit which came upon Ahab after the denunciation of the prophet, is noted as another manifestation of his susceptibility. Chalmers holds him to have been the subject or victim of a resistless pathology, which, while it made him the slave of the worst, also brought him occasionally under the sway of the better emotions. This view of Ahab's character is taken to be confirmed by the narrative of his dealings with Naboth. There is covetousness, for instance, to which he gave way; there is

"What wonder," exclaims the historian of Latin Christianity, "that in such days men sought refuge in the wilderness, and almost adored hermits like Columban!" Another reminder of Elijah.

also wounded pride, to the mortifying sense of which he gave way in deep and helpless dejection, there being within him no counteractive energy by which to surmount and get the better of it.

With no energy on the side of conscience to overcome his covetousness, neither had he energy on the side of daring and aggressive wickedness, to revenge himself for the affront which he had suffered and enable him to trample on the offender. But this energy which he wanted, Dr. Chalmers goes on to say, "was abundantly made up for by Jezebel. She got his consent to use his name for anything. In his passiveness he laid no obstacle in the way of the most enormous atrocities, though he had no aggressiveness for the perpetration of them." Ahab only permitted, Jezebel perpetrated. She it was who wrote the letters, and sealed them, and sent them, and all to compass a most diabolical iniquity—in which, too, she succeeded by the subornation of false witnesses— so that, as the author of Hora Biblica Quotidiana sums up the indictment against her, Jezebel, with unfaltering step, through the fourfold guilt of deceit, and perjury, and robbery, and murder, got Ahab installed in full possession of the vineyard upon which his heart was set.

As there are Shakspearean commentators who take Lady Macbeth, from certain incidental allusions, to have been a small, slight creature in her physical presence, so has the speculation been hazarded, that Ahab's energetic wife was a little woman. As a rule, we are told, the little woman is brave. When the lymphatic giantess falls into a faint or goes off into hysterics, she "storms, or bustles about, or holds on like a game terrier, according to the work on hand." Judith and Jael, it is allowed, were probably large women: the work they went about demanded a certain strength of muscle and toughness of sinew. But "who can say that Jezebel was not a small, freckled, auburnhaired Lady Audley of her time," full of the concentrated fire, the electric force, the passionate recklessness of her type? Regan and Goneril, according to the essay on Little Women, might have been beautiful demons of the same pattern.

Why should Ahab's spirit be so sad, and he eat no bread,

HE FALTERING, SHE UNSCRUPULOUS.

191

because the refusal of Naboth the Jezreelite to part with his vineyard sent the king home heavy and displeased? Why should Ahab be cast down and put about by such a trifle as that? If he had no spirit, had he not a wife? And was not that wife a woman of spirit? Had she not a will of her own, and a way of her own, in all such matters? And where there was a will of hers, would there not easily be a way? give him the vineyard of Naboth the Jezreelite. had the dash and daring of his wife! "Dost thou the kingdom of Israel?" And if not, why not? Art thou a king then? King or no king? No king at all, unless thou govern as well as reign. Jezebel will show how Naboth may

She would Pity but he

now govern

be disposed of straightway. So, "Arise, and eat bread, and let thine heart be merry. I will give thee the vineyard of Naboth the Jezreelite." The self-accusing prince in Shakspeare avows such

"A stanchless avarice, that, were I king,

I should cut off the nobles for their lands;
Desire his jewels, and this other's horse;
And my more-having would be as a sauce

To make me hunger more; that I should forge
Quarrels unjust against the good and loyal,
Destroying them for wealth."

And this was Jezebel's cue. As in Rome's day of trouble and proscription under Sulla, when the many sacrifices to resentment and revenge were few compared with those who fell on account of their wealth; so that it was a common saying, "His fine house was the death of this man, and his gardens of that.”

There is about Lady Macbeth a more than shadowy resemblance to the unscrupulous wife of Ahab; and her “Are you a man?" is a proper parallel to Jezebel's "Dost thou now govern the kingdom of Israel ?" To apply the remonstrant appeal of another Shakspearean woman of spirit, though in this case, happily, not of the same spirit,-—

*

"Alas, it is the baseness of thy fear
That makes thee strangle thy propriety,"

* Or of one, again, in Landor's Gebir:
"And canst thou reign?

Yield empire, or comply."

or, disown thy property; for Ahab's property, to all intents and purposes, Jezebel already accounted the Jezreelite's vineyard to be. "Oh that you bore the mind that I do!" exclaims another reckless instigator, impatient of a shilly-shallying superior. Si vir es, i. Gibbon tells us of the trembling Emperor Justinian, when his competitor, Hypatius, supported by the multitude, had the means to expel him from place and power, and when a secret resolution was already formed, in the Byzantine palace, to convey to some safe retreat the Emperor and his family, in one of the vessels that lay ready at the garden stairs,—that Justinian was lost, if the bold bad woman "whom he raised from the theatre, had not renounced the timidity as well as the virtues of her sex." For, in the midst of a council then held, where Belisarius himself was present, Theodora alone displayed the spirit of a hero; and she alone could save the Emperor from the imminent danger, and from his unworthy fears. If flight, she said, were the only means of safety, yet should she disdain to fly! And the firmness of the woman restored the courage to deliberate and to act. Compare again what we read of Anna Comnena,-that, stimulated by ambition and revenge to conspire against the life of her brother, when the design was prevented by the fears or scruples of her husband, she passionately exclaimed, that nature had mistaken the two sexes, and had endowed Bryennius with the soul of a woman. * Cicero got to be very tired indeed of the appeals to his manliness, against overwhelming dejection,—especially when it was his wife that sought to rouse his courage, ut animo sit magno. Terentia, indeed, was a woman whose "masculine energy," as the Dean of Christchurch puts it, must have been oppressive to his less resolute character. Addison, in a number of the Freeholder, quotes with a relish the traditional words of Boadicea to her

*M. Philarète Chasles accredits Anna with a pronounced faculty for expressing herself, on occasion, avec une franchise brutale. "On n'ignore pas que, mécontente de la froideur et de la lâcheté féminine de son mari, Nicéphore Bryennius, elle lui reprocha ce défaut d'énergie virile en termes si naïfs et si nets, que nous rougirions de les rapporter."-Etudes sur l'Antiquité: Des Femmes Grecques.