He bow'd his nature, never known before but a Volscian thereupon interposes with 66_ Sir, his stoutness, When he did stand for consul, which he lost an interposition cut short by Tullus, who is not disposed to hear others dilate on stooping to conquer. After quoting, with due emphasis of admiration, a celebrated passage from Novalis, about the reverence due to man as a Revelation in the Flesh-the body of man being a Templeand thus " we touch Heaven, when we lay hands on a human body"-Diogenes Teufelsdröckh characteristically adds, that, on this ground, he would fain go further than most do; and that whereas the English Johnson only bowed to every Clergyman, or man with a shovel hat, he, Diogenes of Weissnichtwo, would bow to every man with any sort of hat, or with no hat whatever ;—for is not every man, on the mystic transcendentalist's showing, a Temple; the visible Manifestation and Impersonation of the Divinity?-Yet to carry out this principle consistently, would be to keep bowing with a vengeance. And indeed, on second thoughts, Teufelsdröckh recognises the impracticable tendency of any such doctrine, and owns, with an alas, that "such indiscriminate bowing serves not. For," he continues, there is a Devil dwells in man, as well as a Divinity; and too often the bow is but pocketed by the former. It would go to the pocket of Vanity (which is your clearest phasis of the Devil, in these times); therefore must we withhold it." 66 A WOULD-BE EXTERMINATOR. 279 H A WOULD-BE EXTERMINATOR. ESTHER iii. 6. AMAN was magnificent in his scheme of massacre. His statesmanship, such as it was, was to be, in Strafford's phrase, thorough. Having a spite against a Jew, he was for making a clean riddance of the Jews. His will was to improve them off the face of the earth-or so much of it, at least, as came under his malign influence. For when Haman saw that Mordecai the Jew bowed not, nor did him reverence, then was Haman full of wrath. So full, that he "thought scorn to lay hands on Mordecai alone; for they had showed him the people of Mordecai: wherefore Haman sought to destroy all the Jews that were throughout the whole kingdom of Ahasuerus, even the people of Mordecai." All, and at one fell swoop. The earliest specimen which is left us of the pulpit eloquence of Jeremy Taylor, consists of a sermon on the anniversary of the Gunpowder Treason, the preacher being then a young man, just commencing his ministry under the auspices of Archbishop Laud; and in the course of this sermon—of which Charles Lamb affirms that, from the learning and maturest oratory it displays, one should rather have conjectured it to have proceeded from the same person after he was ripened by time into a bishop and father of the Church—after detailing instances of wholesale massacre from sacred story and profane, none of them equal in atrocity, on the preacher's showing, to the design of Guy Fawkes, the homily includes this sentence : Haman would have killed the people, but spared the king; but that both king and people, princes and judges, branch and rush and root, should die at once (as if Caligula's wish were actuated, and all England upon one head), was never known till now, that all the malice of the world met in this as a centre." The antithesis about willing to slay the people, but sparing the king, is a little confused or overstretched, and scarcely denotes the mature divine as recognized by Elia; but let that pass. Accurately enough, for all practical purposes 66 and intents, is the volition of Haman, coupled with the aspiration of Caligula,* that the Roman people had but one neck, and he the slicing of it. Ben Jonson characterizes this wish of the emperor's as "worthier a headsman than a head." "But he found, when he fell, that they"-the people of Rome, for whom he desiderated a single neck—"had many hands." Haman's wish is expanded by Racine into a number of sonorous lines, duly expressive of the vindictive dues of un homme tel qu'Aman: "Il faut des châtiments dont l'univers frémisse; Qu'on tremble en comparant l'offense et le supplice; "I would there were Toute la nation fut ainsi condamnée. more Romes than one to ruin!" exclaims one of the Catiline conspirators, and "More Romes! more worlds !" is the echo, reduplicated, of another of the crew. So Catiline himself, in the fine, if all-but-forgotten tragedy which bears his name, is made to utter the wish, "That I could reach the axle, where the pins are Which bolt this frame, that I might pull them out, Gibbon says of Justinian II., when describing how that vindictive emperor planted a foot on each of the necks of the two usurpers, prostrate and in chains, Leontius and Apsimar,— that the universal defection which he had once experienced might provoke him to repeat the wish of Caligula, that the Roman people had but one head. But the historian "presumes to observe" that such a wish is unworthy of an ingenious * M. Ch. de Bernard, in one of his books, ascribes the mot to Nero,where he makes an angered hero declare, of the objects of his ire, "Mais en ce moment je suis comme Néron, je voudrais qu'elles n'eussent qu'une tête." WOULD-BE EXTERMINATORS. 281 tyrant, since his revenge and cruelty would have been extinguished by a single blow, instead of the slow variety of tortures which Justinian inflicted on the victims of his anger. Avidus communis exitii, are the words of Boethius, in recording Theodoric's eagerness to involve the whole Senate in one common ruin.* Timon of Athens, now a confirmed man-hater, railing at mankind from his cave in the woods, utters the wish, in eating a root he has grubbed up from the earth, “That the whole life of Athens were in this! Thus would I eat it." Lear, in his first fury of maddening imprecation, would have the "all-shaking thunder strike flat the thick rotundity o' the world, crack nature's moulds, all germens spill at once, that make ingrateful man!" So bereaved Northumberland, in a strained passion that, as Travers tells him, does him wrong, would have 66 one spirit of the first-born Cain Reign in all bosoms, that, each heart being set On bloody courses, the rude scene may end, Sicinius denounces Coriolanus as a viper, that would depopulate the city, and be every man himself. Volumnia, in the same Roman tragedy, would have the red pestilence strike all trades in Rome, and occupations perish. Menenius is candid enough, in his crabbed cynical candour, to declare, respecting her son, and Rome's usage of him, that "If he could burn us all into * Caligula's wish may have been all the more present in the mind of Boethius, from his declaring that had he known of a conspiracy against the king, he would "have answered in the words of a noble Roman to the frantic Caligula: You would not have known it from me. Robert Burns, in one of his hot and heterodox letters, is so far from mealy-mouthed as regards the opponents of Dr. M'Gill, of Ayr, that he indites this Caligulan passage to their address, as the French say: "Creation-disgracing scélérats such as they, God only can mend, and the devil only can punish. In the comprehending way of Caligula, I wish they all had but one neck." The odium theologicum is noway limited to divines. Ecclesiastical history tells how Athanasius lived to triumph over the ashes of a prince who-though Julian was no Caligula—in words of formidable import had declared his wish, that the whole venom of the Galilean school were contained in the single person of Athanasius. Voltaire's écrasez l'infame might seem a latter-day echo of Julian's aspiration to crush the Galilean. here in thy person," exclaims the kindly gentleman to the squalid street-sweeper in Lord Lytton's book, "and we could aid it as easily as I can thee!" Pre-eminent as representative man of all-expansive good-will to men, would be the subject of one of Crabbe's kindliest sketches,—but for the fatal flaw of a patriotism too pronounced: "The wish that Roman necks in one were found, That he who form'd the wish might deal the wound, Is that desire which rises in his mind; All but his own, in one right hand to grow, WHO ESTHER'S "IF I PERISH." ESTHER iv. 16. HO knew whether Esther was come to the kingdom for such a time as this,—a time of deadly peril to the Jewish people, from which her prompt intercession with the Persian prince might avail to save them? The time was out of joint; it might be no "cursed spite" that ever she was born to set it right. So, let her speak to the king, speak straightway, for there was no time to lose; and speak out, for the crisis forbade trifling. What though it was notorious that whosoever, whether man or woman, should come into the inner court, who was not called, incurred the penalty of death, unless indeed the king should hold out the golden sceptre, and let the intruder * Dr. Thomas Brown, physician and metaphysician, warms to his work in describing "that almost divine universality of benevolence, in a whole virtuous life," to which every moment is either some exertion for good or some wish for good, which comprehends within its sphere of action, that has no limits but physical impossibility, every being whom it can instruct, or amend, or relieve, or gladden, and, in its sphere of generous desire, all that is beyond the limits of its power of benefiting.-See his forty-first Lecture on the Philosophy of the Human Mind. |