UNLOVED, UNLAMENTED. 243 now-a-days would incline to say, nous avons changé tout cela. It is a commonplace in modern biography, such a passage as this in a letter of Malone about the late Lord Southwell (1766): "So worthless a man, that I believe he has not left many wet eyes after him. It appears pretty plain how friendless he must have been," etc. Or such as Southey's memento of Miss Trewbody as entombed in the Cathedral at Salisbury, with a panegyrical epitaph, inscribed on a marble shield supported by two Cupids, who bent their heads over the edge, shedding marble tears larger than grey peas, and something of the same colour: "These were the only tears which her death occasioned, and the only Cupids with whom she had ever any concern." Or such as the notice written by Frederick Perthes of the funeral of Duke Augustus of Saxe-Gotha, half a century ago, -"a melancholy spectacle, no sympathy shown by high or low, town or country. The domestic servants the only mourners, and the duke's favourite cock, which was almost always with him night and day, alone looked solemn and tragical." What says that brawny spearman, Earl Doorm, in one of Mr. Tennyson's Arthurian idylls, to the drooping damsel he finds in tears in a corner of his hall, and whom to see weeping makes him mad : "Good luck had your good man, For were I dead who is it would weep for me?” Or what, again, the tyrant Adrastus, in Talfourd's tragedy, when Ion stands by his couch, knife in hand, and bids him, if there is a friend whom he would, dying, greet by word or token, to speak his last bidding : "Adras. Ion. I have none on earth. Most piteous doom!" Not one friend! Agolanti, again, in Leigh Hunt's Legend of Florence, is roughly forewarned of a coming day when he shall take to his bed, friendless and forlorn; when even— "The nurse that makes a penny of your pillow, And would desire you gone, but your groans pay her, Shall turn from the last agony in your throat, Out of that bad dream of his, in his tent, on the eve of Bosworth field, Shakspeare's Richard starts in affright, and counts his wages :— Guilty! guilty! I shall despair. -There is no creature loves me ; Nay, wherefore should they? since that I myself IT GEDALIAH: FATALLY UNSUSPECTING. JEREMIAH xl. 16; xli. 2. T might almost be called a time of refreshing from the presence of the Lord, for the remnant of His captive people, the short time of Gedaliah's rule over them. He encouraged them to dwell in the land. Jeremiah the prophet came to Gedaliah, and dwelt with him among the people that were left in the land. And in answer to the good-hearted governor's summons to all and sundry, to rest with confidence under his protection, and to cultivate their garden-grounds in peace, none daring to make them afraid, we read that "even all the Jews [that were in Moab, and among the Ammonites, and in Edom, and that were in all the countries] returned out of all places whither they were driven, and came to the land of Judah, to Gedaliah, unto Mizpeh, and gathered wine and summer fruits very much." But it was all too brief a gleam of summer-tide. Ishmael the son of Nethaniah was bent on taking the governor's life; and the design was fully made known to the governor by one who besought his sanction for anticipating the blow. Not merely was Gedaliah peremptory against Johanan's offer to cut off the would-be assassin, but he pooh-poohed the existence of any such project of assassination. He seems to have thought, good easy man, too kindly of GENEROUS INCREDULITY. 245 human nature in general, and of Ishmael in particular. Why should Ishmael owe him a grudge? Or, if he did, or fancied he did, yet what ground was there for suspecting the man, beyond Johanan's heated fancy? So "Gedaliah the son of Ahikam said unto Johanan the son of Kareah, Thou shalt not do this thing: for thou speakest falsely of Ishmael." As though this Ishmael were like the typical one of old, against whom was every man's hand; but unlike him in his hand being against every man, or indeed against any man,-at all events, against the one man whose life, Johanan alleged, he was bent on taking. Let Ishmael alone; there was no harm in him. Johanan might mean well; but neither did Ishmael mean ill. To suspect him of foul play, was to do him foul wrong. Whether, if Gedaliah had given credence to Johanan's word of warning, he would also have connived at Johanan's device of bloodshed, secretly and swiftly to be carried out, may be, and may here remain, an open question. Enough for the purpose of these notes, that he would lend no ear to the warning, that he would give no heed to what he accounted a false alarm; and that the generous incredulity was fatal to him. Free access to him was still, as before, the privilege of Ishmael and his conspirators; and at once they made use of it. They ate bread together in Mizpeh. And it would appear as if the conspirators took that opportunity of slaying their host. For, "then arose Ishmael the son of Nethaniah, and the ten men that were with him, and smote Gedaliah the son of Ahikam with the sword, and slew him whom the king of Babylon had made governor over the land." And it was the second day after the slaying of Gedaliah before any man knew of it. To be slain at table, whether as host or as guest, adds even a blacker shade to the black shadow of death by violence. The perfidious advantage taken of the confidence then and there pledged, by the mere fact of sitting at the same board together, and together breaking bread, and perhaps pledging each the other in cups of wine that maketh glad the heart of man,-other murder may be strange, and must be foul; this, "Murder most foul, as in the best it is; But this most foul, strange, and unnatural." At table fell worthless, wicked Amnon, at the signal of his brother, worthless, wicked Absalom. With confidence came the doomed libertine to the sheep-shearing feast in Baalhazor, to which Absalom, to make sure of him, had invited all the king's sons. "Now Absalom had commanded his servants, saying, Mark ye now when Amnon's heart is merry with wine, and when I say unto you, Smite Amnon; then kill him, fear not; have not I commanded you? be courageous, and be valiant." Evidently their master was prepared for at least some show of reluctance to fulfil such a behest as this. But they were compliant; and the servants of Absalom did unto Amnon as Absalom had commanded. So again with Elah, the son of Baasha, who reigned over Israel in Tirzah for two years. His servant Zimri, captain of half his chariots, conspired against him as he was in Tirzah, drinking himself drunk in the house of Arza, steward of his house in Tirzah, where Zimri went in and smote him, and killed him, and reigned in his stead. Had Zimri peace, who thus slew his master? It was at a banquet in Jericho that Ptolemy, the son-in-law of Simon the Maccabee, contrived basely to assassinate him and his elder son; the younger, John Hyrcanus, eluded the assassin's toils, and by escaping frustrated his devices, much as the escape of Fleance marred the manoeuvres of Macbeth. Sesostris, after his return from his conquests in Asia and Europe, was invited by his brother, whom he had left viceroy in Egypt, to a banquet, together with his family; and wood being heaped all round the building, the host set fire to it; and if Sesostris effected a very narrow escape, it was only by sacrificing two of his six sons, as Herodotus tells the story, and using their bodies to bridge the circle of flame. In Herodotus too we read of the seven ambassadors sent from Persia by Megabazus to the Macedonian court of King Amyntas, who were by that sovran entertained at a feast, and there, while heavy with wine, assassinated by his son. MURDERED FEASTING. 247 The prince, like Absalom, believed himself to have good cause to show, and would have justified himself in the tone of Sciarrha in the play : "Flo. And in your crownèd tables And hospitality, would you murder them? Sci. Yes, and the reason wherefore they were murder'd, In his cups slew Alexander Cleitus in his cups. To a feast was Sertorius invited by Perpena, who saw no possibility of openly attacking one who never appeared without an armed body-guard; to that feast, ostensibly given on account of some victory gained by one of his lieutenants, Sertorius went, and at it he was treacherously murdered by the conspirators. Amleth, prince of Jutland, nominally the original of Hamlet, prince of Denmark, at the feast which was given in honour of his return after prolonged absence, kept himself sober, while zealously plying all the nobles with drink; and while they lay about, he is said to have loosed a curtain made by his mother which hung about the hall, and, letting it fall on their prostrate bodies, fastened it tight by pegs to the ground, and set the building on fire. When Gibbon has to relate how the too credulous prince, Gabinius, king of the Quadi, was persuaded to accept the pressing invitation of Marcellinus, “I am at a loss," he says, "how to vary the narrative of similar crimes; or how to relate, that in the course of the same year [A.D. 374], but in remote parts of the empire [under Valentinian], the inhospitable table of two Imperial generals was stained with the royal blood of two guests and allies, inhumanly murdered by their order, and in their presence;" the fate of Gabinius and of Para being the same, although the cruel death of their sovran was resented in a very different manner by the servile temper of the Armenians, and the free and daring spirit of the Germans. In the case of the royal Armenian, it was to the subtle prudence of Count Trajan that the execution of the bloody deed was committed; by him Para was invited to a Roman banquet, which had been prepared with all the pomp and sensuality of the East: the hall resounded with cheerful |