so wept that the Jews could not help exclaiming, "Behold, how He loved him!" As Elisha, too, wept prophetic tears because he foresaw the evil that Hazael would do to the children of Israel, setting on fire their strongholds, and slaying their young men with the sword, and dashing their children against the stones; even so did the Son of Man, when He was come near Jerusalem, and beheld the city, weep over it, in prevision of the coming days when it should be laid even with the ground, and when not one stone of it should be left upon another. Tears, idle tears, He knew not what they mean; but tears, as from the depth of some divine despair, rose at His heart and gathered to His eyes, in thinking of what Jerusalem might have been, and in thinking that all too soon Jerusalem would be no more.

In Mrs. Browning's criticisms upon, and translated specimens of, the Greek Christian Poets, passing mention is made, and no more, of Nonnus of Panopolis, the poet of the Dionysiaca, a work of some twenty-two thousand verses, on some twenty-two thousand subjects, shaken together, who "flourished," as people say of many a dry-rooted soul, at the commencement of the fifth century. His paraphrase, in hexameters, of St. John's gospel thus traduces what his translator designates "the two well-known words, bearing on their brief vibration the whole passion of a world saved through pain from pain❞— traduces them, consistently with his imputed gift of doing all that a bald verbosity can do or undo, to quench the divinity of that divine narrative :

"They answered him,

'Come and behold.' Then Jesus himself groaned,

Dropping strange tears from eyes unused to weep.”

Mrs. Browning has no patience with such a paraphrase. "Unused to weep!" she repeats. "Was it so of the man of sorrows? O obtuse poet!"

Tears celebrated in story and song-the tears of strong men, brave men, rough and rugged men—some tiny efflux, in homœopathic globules, of the mighty whole, will more than fill, will overflow, a chapter such as this.

66

A FLOOD OF TEARS.

59

The first thing, it has been said, which astonishes an English schoolboy, on being introduced to Homer, is the abundant tears which are shed by the noblest heroes of the story; nor does this display of feeling appear to have been thought by their contemporaries then, or by their fellow-countrymen in after ages, as less suitable to their characters and positions, than to those of Andromache or Cassandra. Menelaus weeps. Ulysses weeps on the smallest provocation." Achilles rises before us, pacing the beach, "bathed in tears of anger and disdain," as Pope ventures in his translation to call those tears of which, says he in his Notes, "a great and fiery temper is more susceptible than any other "--but which, with studied respect to the hero's dignity, Homer, it is assumed, makes him retire to shed where no eye shall see the effusion, no tongue blab of it. Agamemnon weeps, and that openly, profusely, before his assembled peers : "down his wan cheek a briny torrent flows." Phoenix weeps, ere appealing to Achilles to relent: "down his white beard a stream of sorrow flows." And when Patroclus to Achilles flies,

"The streaming tears fall copious from his eyes;

Not faster, trickling to the plains below,

From the tall rock the sable waters flow."

An effusion so redundant as to excite his friend's curiosity concerning the grief

"That flows so fast in these unmanly tears.

No girl, no infant whom the mother keeps

From her loved breast, with fonder passion weeps."

Villehardouin, Joinville, and the old chroniclers generally, are similarly frank and explicit in recording the tears of their heroes. As Sainte-Beuve says of Joinville: "Toutes les fois que ses héros et chevaliers auront peur ou qu'ils verseront des larmes, il le dira."

many instances to be found Flavius, for example, faithful

Let us glance at some of the in Shakspeare of men in tears. old steward of Timon, who is even moved by the sight. Timon at the mouth of his cave spurns visitors and suppliants

of every degree, and is for spurning Flavius with the rest— rejecting off-hand his profession of being "an honest poor servant" of Timon's. If that's what he is, then Timon knows him; never had honest man about him; all he kept were knaves, to serve in meat to villains.

Flav.

-The gods are witness,
Ne'er did poor steward wear a truer grief
For his undone lord, than mine eyes for you.

Tim. What, dost thou weep?-Come nearer ;-then, I love thee,
Because thou art a woman, and disclaim'st

Flinty mankind; whose eyes do never give,

But thorough lust, and laughter. Pity's sleeping:

Strange times, that weep with laughing, not with weeping." That tragedy of the life and death of Timon of Athens closes with the reading of his self-written epitaph, on the gravestone where he lies newly entombed "upon the very hem of the sea." Alcibiades reaches it, and thus apostrophises the departed:

"Though thou abhorr'dst in us our human griefs,

Scorn'dst our brain's flow, and those our droplets which

From niggard nature fall, yet rich conceit

Taught thee to make vast Neptune weep for aye

On thy low grave, on faults forgiven."

Lear, deprived of fifty of his followers at a clap, within a fortnight of abdication, by the elder of the daughters in whose favour he abdicated, and otherwise insulted under her roof, is as mad with himself for weeping, as with her for giving him such cause to weep.

66 -Life and death! I am ashamed

That thou hast power to shake my manhood thus:
That these hot tears, which break from me perforce,
Should make thee worth them.-

Old fond eyes,

Beweep this cause again, I'll pluck you out;

And cast you, with the waters that you loose,

To temper clay."

This is but the close of the first Act. The second closes with the pronounced coalition of the sisters against their sire.

A FLOOD OF TEARS.

61

If Goneril had previously struck off fifty of his followers at a clap, she now demands of him what need he has of five-andtwenty, ten, or five. What need one? is Regan's adjoined query. And that breaks the father's heart. He appeals to the heavens to touch him with noble anger, not with melting tears: "O, let not women's weapons, water-drops, Stain my man's cheeks!"

And anon, amid a paroxysm of stifling wrath and anguish, turning to his daughters, "unnatural hags," with incoherent, inarticulate threats of unheard-of revenges, Lear exclaims:

66 -You think, I'll weep;

No, I'll not weep :—

I have full cause of weeping; but this heart
Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws

Or ere I'll weep.-O, fool, I shall go mad!"

And he keeps his word. Mad he becomes, and the ravings of his madness move to tears the disguised Edgar and sightless Gloster :

Lear. "If thou [to Gloster] wilt weep my fortunes, take my eyes.

I know thee well enough; thy name is Gloster :
Thou must be patient; we came crying hither.
Thou know'st, the first time that we smell the air,
We wawl, and cry

.....

When we are born, we cry, that we are come
To this great stage of fools."

Collatinus and Lucretius emulate each the other's passion first of words and then of tears:

"This windy tempest, till it blow up rain,
Held back his sorrow's tide, to make it more :
At last it rains, and busy winds give o'er.
Then son and father weep with equal strife,

Who should weep most, for daughter or for wife."

In the old ballad which tells of a bloody field as e'er was fought on summer's day, when, of King Arthur's "own party, only himself escapèd there," except Duke Lukyn and Bedevere

the butler-this expressive stanza catches (sometimes to dim)

the eye:

"And when the king beheld his knights,

All dead and scattered on the mould,
The tears fast trickled down his face,
That manly face in fight so bold."

Tears are, however, accounted a phenomenon in men, which in women they most certainly are not. Mr. Slick calls it easy enough to stand a woman's tears, "for they weep like children, everlastin' sun-showers; they cry as bad as if they used a chestnut burr for an eyestone;" but, he adds, in his ironical way, "to see the tear drawn from starn natur' of man, startin' at the biddin' of generous feelin', there's no standin' that.” But the tears of a man bring with them no comfort, as do those of the softer sex, remarks Mr. Trollope, when he flings Harry Norman on the sofa, "forgetting his manhood and bursting into tears. He was a strong tall man, and it was dreadful to see him thus convulsed." The elderly lady who has to soothe him, has to play the same part by another manly or unmanly weeper, later in the tale, where we see the said Mrs. Woodward watching Charley Tudor for a while in silence, as she " saw big tears drop from his face on to the dust of the path on the further side. There they came rolling down, large globules of sorrow. Nothing is so painful to a woman as a man in tears, and Mrs. Woodward's heart was wrung to its very core." It may be easier work, dealing with a man who has no scruple about exhibiting his grief; like Voltaire, for instance, who "fondait bonnement en larmes" where Mme. du Châtelet giggled to stifle a good cry-" car il n'a pas de honte, lui, de paraître sensible." Not to his mind, in this respect, any more than to Rousseau's own, would be the avowal of the afflicted husband as pictured, by his wife's death-bed, in Jean-Jacques' super-sentimental fiction, when surprised into tears: "Je ne croyais pas mes yeux faits pour en répandre. Ce furent les premiers depuis ma naissance, ce seront les derniers jusqu'à ma mort." Tears of this critical, exceptional character it is that Lord Lytton puts into, or draws