'HE WEPT FOR WORLDS TO CONQUER? 223 der the Great is a stereotyped text in the matter of conquering the world, and then weeping for want of other worlds to conquer. He is a type for all time with the satirists: now Butler : "The whole world was not half so wide Now Byron : 66 To Alexander, when he cried, "Though Alexander's urn a show be grown On shores he wept to conquer, though unknown— He 'wept for worlds to conquer !' He who ne'er With even the busy Northern Isle unknown, Which holds his urn, and never knew his throne." To Anaxarchus is ascribed the occasion of these tears, he having instructed Alexander in his doctrine of an infinity of worlds; "whereby Alexander, it seems, was brought out of opinion with his geography, who before that time thought there remained nothing, or not much, beyond his conquests;" which puts another gloss on the raison d'être of the tearshinc illa lachrymæ. Addison, in his Italian travels, remarks upon a beautiful bust of Alexander the Great," in the famous gallery at Florence, "casting up his eyes to heaven with a noble air of grief or discontentedness in his looks. I have seen two or three other antique busts of Alexander in the same air and posture, and am apt to think the sculptor had in his thoughts the conqueror's weeping for new worlds." In one of his Spectators, Addison moralizes on ambition as perhaps filling the mind for a while with a giddy kind of pleasure, but such a pleasure as makes a man restless and uneasy under it, and does less to satisfy the present thirst than to excite fresh desires, and set the soul on new enterprises.* For how few ambitious men there are who have got as much fame as they desired, and whose thirst after it has not been as eager in the very height of their reputation as it was before they became known and eminent among men! "There is not any circumstance in Cæsar's character which gives me a greater idea of him, than a saying which Cicero tells us he frequently made use of in private conversation, 'That he was satisfied with his share of life and fame.'" Se satis vel ad naturam, vel ad gloriam, vixisse. Like one object in Wordsworth's musings near Aquapendente, Bearing the world-acknowledged evidence Struggling against the stream of destiny,† Fontenelle's Phryne tells Alexander, that if he had only conquered Greece, the neighbouring islands, and perhaps some part of Asia Minor, and constituted them into one State, nothing could have been better contrived or more reasonable; but to be always running without knowing whither, to be always taking cities without knowing why, has-well, Phryne puts it mildly" displeased many sensible persons." Such a sensible person was Seneca, who, in his chapter (in the Morals) on a happy life, puts the question, What matters it how far "An ambitious man," writes Horace Walpole, " must be divested of all feeling but for himself. The torment of others is his high road to happiness. Were the transmigration of souls true, and accompanied by consciousness, how delighted would Alexander or Croesus be to find themselves on four legs, and divested of a wish to conquer new worlds, or to heap up all the wealth of this."-Letters, vol. vii., p. 400. Of the Alexander of our nineteenth century, as Napoleon is often called, M. Villemain observes, in reference to his implied necessity de recommencer une campagne aggressive, that "ce jeu terrible d'accumuler les ennemis et les obstacles, pour les abattre d'un plus grand effort, n'est pas toujours heureux. Il ne va pour ainsi dire qu'à la jeunesse du génie et de la fortune; et probablement il se serait usé pour Alexandre lui-même, si le vainqueur de la Perse et de l'Inde eût duré plus longtemps."—Villemain : Souvenirs Contemporains, p. 325. FOR NEW WORLDS TO CONQUER. 66 225 Alexander extended his conquests, if he never got to feel satisfied with what he had? Every man wants as much as he covets, and labour lost it is to pour into a vessel that will never be full. Ambition of the Alexandrine metre "propounds matters even impossible when it has once arrived at things beyond expectation.” Alexander," says the same old master of morals in another place, "was possessed with the madness of laying kingdoms waste. Beginning with Greece, where he was brought up, he enslaved Lacedæmon and silenced Athens ; and not satisfied with destroying the cities which his father, Philip, had either conquered or bought, he "made himself the enemy of human nature, and like the worst of beasts, he worried what he could not eat." This may be a culpably and calumniously one-sided and distorted view of him men call the Great; but it is only with the mere fact of his insatiate and insatiable nature that we are here concerned. He is a type of his kind. And so, of the self-same kind, however differing in degree, is the Joab Hunter commemorated by the Clockmaker of Slickville, who-that is Joab, not Samuel-" whipped every one that darst try him, both in Slickville and its vycinity, and then sot down and cried like a child, 'cause folks were afeard of him," and there was nobody left for him to fight. And, of course, with him, to fight meant to whip. "Si les hommes pouvaient s'entendre! So muses the modern French poet, Lebrun. So too, in one poet, Edmund "The world's great conqueror would his point pursue, WHE A GARDEN GRAVE. 2 KINGS xxi. 18, 26; ST. JOHN xix. 41. HEN the time came for Manasseh, King of Judah, to sleep with his fathers, he was buried in the garden of his own house, in the garden of Uzza. Some think this was the place where Uzziah was buried—who, sleeping with his fathers, was buried with his fathers in the field of the burial which belonged to the kings; for they said, He is a leper. Bishop Patrick echoes the surmise of the speculative, that penitent Manasseh may have desired to be buried here, as unworthy, because of his manifold sins, to be laid in the common sepulchre of the kings of Judah. Amon, his son, however, who walked in all the bad ways that Manasseh had walked in, but failed to follow him in the paths of penitence and peace, was also buried in the sepulchre in the garden of Uzza; without any token of the choice or motive attributed to his father. Be there choice in either case, or not-be there motive as alleged, or none-the incident is in itself markworthy, and by the chronicler of the two kings' reigns is evidently considered such, that alike Manasseh, King of Judah, and Amon his son and successor, were buried out of the ordinary course, in a garden grave. Naturally the place of burial reminds one of the most memorable of all interments. The New Testament as well as the Old has its signal record of a garden grave. He that was wounded for our transgression, and bruised for our iniquities, -He, the despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief-is said by the prophet to have made His grave with the wicked and with the rich in His death. The reference is assumed, rightly or wrongly, to point, in the last clause at least, however the penultimate one may be interpreted, to that rich man of Arimathea, named Joseph, who also himself was Jesus' disciple, and who begged of Pilate the body of Jesus, and laid it in his own new tomb, which he had hewn out in the rock. So St. Matthew tells us; and from St. John we learn, that in the place where Jesus was crucified there was 'IN THE GARDEN A SEPULCHRE. 227 a garden; and in the garden a new sepulchre, wherein was never man yet laid. There laid they Jesus, therefore, because of the Jews' preparation-day; for the sepulchre was nigh at hand. " "This is no place of graves," exclaims Dr. Hanna, as he looks around; "here rise around us no memorials of the dead; you see but a single sepulchre, and that sepulchre in a garden." He calls it a strange mingling, this, of opposites, the garden of life and growth and beauty circling the sepulchre designed for death, corruption, and decay. "Miniature of the strange world we live in. What garden of it has not its own grave? Your path may, for a time, be through flowers and fragrance; follow it far enough, it leads ever to a grave." Henry Melvill expatiates on the choice of the spot by Joseph of Arimathea, as a highly significant circumstance. He might, in constructing a tomb for himself, have done so in some distant place, which he only occasionally visited; whereas he constructed it in a garden, to which he would frequently resort -in which he took his daily walk, and wherein he was wont to calm and refresh his mind with the rich foliage of the trees and the sweet blossom of the flowers. "He prepared his own tomb in a garden; a garden-nature's grave" (for if flowers bud and blossom, they also wither and die)-" a garden, the scene of nature's resurrection." What a mixture does it present-a garden in the place of crucifixion, and a sepulchre in the garden! "Strangely are joy and grief blended in human life, and in Christian experience. I will sing,' saith the Psalmist, ' of mercy and judgment.' Of mercy, 'in the place where he was crucified there was a garden.' Of judgment, and in the garden a sepulchre.'" The text admits of fanciful applications as well as of practical improvement; but what further notes on the general topic may here be added, will touch simply on * "But this sepulchre in this garden suggests other and happier thoughts. It was in a garden once of old-in Eden, that death had his first summons given, to find there his first prey; it is in a garden here at Calvary that the last enemy of mankind has the death-blow given to him—that the great Conqueror is in his turn overcome."-The Last Day of our Lord's Passion. By Ŵm. Hanna, LL.D., fifth edition, pp. 330. |