An altar, for human sacrifice apparently, is reared, and “horrid music" is heard, "infernal music, fit for a bloody feast,' and the prisoners deem it prepared to kill their courage, ere soul from body is parted. But let the dispensers of death do their worst: 66 'They that fearless fall, deprive them of their triumph." Each prisoner is primed to say with Seleucus in another of the partners' plays,—

"If my death be next,

The summons shall not make me once look pale."

The Argantes of Tasso's epic confronts the last enemy with like assurance-defiant in death, and against it:

In this resembling the dead warrior, of whom we have a glimpse in a later canto-when Vafrino finds the grass besmeared with drops of blood, and him whose life has thus drained away:

his face to skies

He turns, and seems to threat, though dead he lies."

A face to gaze on with less of horror, but perhaps equal interest, is that of Crescentius, as depicted in a modern lyricin whose eye there was a quenchless energy,

"A spirit that could dare

The deadliest form that death could take,
And dare it for the daring's sake."

Moore's Mokanna is among the sinister specimens of the fearless and defiant: "He knew no more of fear than one who dwells beneath the tropics knows of icicles." Shall we heap together a mass medley of miscellaneous samples from prose fiction? There is Mr. Trollope's Burgo Fitzgerald, for instance, of whom, as he quietly boasts, no one could say that he was afraid of anybody or of anything. From Sir Walter Scott come examples by the dozen. Michael Turnbull tells De Walton, in Castle Dangerous, that he has no more

EXAMPLES FROM SIR WALTER SCOTT. 349

fear in facing whatever that English governor can do, than he has in levelling to the earth it grows upon, the sapling which, suiting the deed to the word, he strikes with his battleaxe from a neighbouring oak-tree. "Fear!" exclaims El Hakim, in The Talisman, when Sir Kenneth asks him in the desert what he fears from yonder Christian horsemen : "Fear!" repeating the word disdainfully, "The sage fears nothing but Heaven." The parting words of the Hermit of Engaddi to the Grand Master are,-" And for thee, TREMBLE !" "Tremble!" replied the Templar, contemptuously, "I cannot if I would." That other Templar in Ivanhoe, Brian de Bois-Guilbert, is characterized by Cedric, on the word of returning warriors from Palestine, as a hardhearted man, who "knows neither fear of earth nor awe of heaven." Front-de-Bœuf alleges of him that he recks neither of heaven nor of hell. With a volley of Dutch oaths Dirk Hatteraick swears it shall never be said that he feared either dog or devil. To Bertram's whisper to Dandie Dinmont, in the same story, not to be afraid of Meg Merrilies in her cavern, "Fear'd! fient a haet care I," says the dauntless farmer, "be she witch or deevil; it's a' ane to Dandie Dinmont." Cleveland tells Norna, in The Pirate, to call forth her demon, if she commands one;"I have been long inaccessible both to fear and to superstition." A man that, like him, has spent years in company with incarnate devils, can scarce, he takes it, dread the presence of a disembodied fiend. One other example of Sir Walter's fearless wrongdoers we have in the titular Earl of Etherington, who thus touches on his correspondent's allusion to possible misgivings and disquietude : "Do I not fear the future? Harry, I will not cut your throat for supposing you to have put the question, but calmly assure you, that I never feared anything in my life. I was born without the sensation, I believe; at least, it is perfectly unknown to me." Lord Lytton endows his Guy Darrell with "that superb kind of pride, which, if terror be felt, makes its action impossible, because a disgrace," and bravery a matter of course, simply because it is honour. Mr.

Kingsley pictures his Hereward, "the last of the English," standing staring and dreaming over renown to come, a true pattern of the half-savage hero of those rough times, capable of all virtues save humility, and capable, too, of all vices except cowardice.

PONTIUS PILATE, THE GOVERNOR.

PONTI

St. MATTHEW xxvii.; ST. JOHN Xviii., xix.

rules et ne gouverne

ONTIUS PILATE, the governor, is in some sort a representative man as ruler who rules et qui ne gouverne pas. The late Lord Brougham, in his inaugural address to the Social Science Congress in 1862, illustrated by several historical examples the proposition he strenuously enforced, that the gravest offence which rulers can commit, is the yielding of their own opinion to the pressure of the multitude. After relating how a prince, the most accomplished warrior and statesman of his time, Bedford, tarnished his great reputation by yielding to public clamour, and sacrificing the Maid of Orleans to its fury, well aware that she had committed no offence, and was a prisoner of war, after rendering services beyond all price to her sovereign, the duke's ally; the aged orator went on to say, "But a yet more memorable instance of this heinous crime, vainly sought to be disguised under the name of weakness, is the great Sacrifice, suffered, nay designed by Providence, acting as ever through second causes, the giving up our Saviour by a governor who thrice over declared his belief in the innocence, nay in the Divine mission of Jesus, but unable to resist the clamour of the mob, when referring to Cæsar, and using his name as well as the high priest'sa Church and King mob; and when we hear sceptics, or rather unbelievers, commending Pilate for his fairness in declaring the mob's victim guiltless, and his courage in standing up against the priests, their leaders, it is exactly that which works his condemnation, and of which he himself distinctly expressed

AN EXECRATED NAME.

351

his shame, ascribing it to his blameable weakness, as all do who have acted this atrocious part, when the danger is over which they have escaped by their baseness." Lord Brougham adds, that Pilate in truth confessed himself guilty of murder, and dismisses him with a glance at the "universal and merited contempt" into which he fell, at the removal of him from his government, and at his alleged death by his own hand.

A branded name, for all time, is that of Pontius Pilate, the governor.

Pursue thy life, and live aye with thy name!"

is the sort of wish that seems to have attached to him, and blighted his career, and blasted his credit. To be nameless in worthy deeds, says Sir Thomas Browne in his Urn Burial, exceeds an infamous history; and after citing the Canaanitish woman as living more happily without a name than Herodias with one, who, he asks, “had not rather have been the good thief, than Pilate ?" When Simeon Stylites, in the Laureate's poem, would avow with unsurpassable emphasis the flagrant wickedness of his nature, he couples Pilate with Judas as saintly in comparison:

66

From my high nest of penance I proclaim
That Pontius and Iscariot by my side
Showed like fair seraphs."

Commenting on Spenser's consignment of Pilate to the "loathly
lakes of Tartarus, Leigh Hunt indulges in a fancy of the
astonishment of this Roman Governor of Jerusalem, could
he have foreseen the destinies of his name. "He doubtless
thought, that if another age spoke of him at all, it would treat
him as a good-natured man who had to rule over a barbarous
people, and make a compromise between his better judgment
and their laws and prejudices." Whereas, in point of fact,
no name, except Iscariot's, has received more execration from
posterity. "Ce Ponce-Pilate
ne se doutait guère
de l'immortalité qu'il se préparait en faisant mettre en croix
un juif obscur," says M. Sylvestre de Sacy, in his review of

*

Salvador's Domination Romaine en Judée. It is markworthy that in the old mystery plays of the Passion, the actor who took Pilate's part made a point of speaking in a hoarse, gruff voice, calculated to set every one against him as a matter of principle and a matter of course. Hence the allusion in Chaucer to the rude rough miller who swore by blood and bones, and who

in Pilates voys began to crye."

As procurator, Pilate must be got by instant pressure and urgent importunity to ratify the condemnation of the Sanhedrim, which, since the occupation of the Romans, as historical critics explain, was no longer sufficient; not that the procurator was invested, like the Imperial legate, with the disposal of life and death; but Jesus was not a Roman citizen, and it only required the authorization of the governor for the sentence pronounced against Him to be carried out. "As always happens, when a political people subjects a race in which the civil and the religious laws are blended [or confounded], the Romans had been brought to give the Jewish law a sort of official support;" and thus, although neutral in religion, the Romans very often sanctioned penalties inflicted for "religious faults. As to Pontius (presumably surnamed Pilate from the pilum, or javelin of honour with which he or one of his ancestors had been decorated), indifferent to the internal quarrels of the Jews, he only saw,—an apologetic expositor contends,-in all these movements of sectaries, the results of

* On the other hand, at the Ammergau Mystery, the character of Pilate, as described by a competent spectator, is in dignity and gravity second only to that of Christ; and the true historical tact of nature has enabled the peasant players to catch the grandeur of the Roman magistrate. Every movement is intended to produce the impression of the superiority of the Roman justice and the Roman manners to the savage, quibbling, vulgar clamours of the Jewish priests and people. "His noble figure, as he appears on the balcony of his house, above the mob-his gentle address the formal reading of the sentence the solemn breaking asunder of the staff, to show that the sentence has been delivered—are bold delineations of the better side of the judge and of the law, under which the catastrophe of the sacred history was accomplished.”—Macmillan's Magazine, ii. 474.