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without the power to aid, beheld their heroic countrymen rushing to the arms of death. At the distance of 1,200 yards the whole line of the enemy belched forth, from thirty iron mouths, a flood of smoke and flame, through which hissed the deadly balls. Their flight was marked by instant gaps in our ranks, by dead men and horses, by steeds flying wounded or riderless across the plain. The first line is broken; it is joined by the second; they never halt or check their speed an instant. With diminished ranks, thinned by those thirty guns, which the Russians had laid with the most deadly accuracy, with a halo of flashing steel above their heads, and with a cheer which was many a noble fellow's death-cry, they flew into the smoke of the batteries, but, ere they were lost from view, the plain was strewed with their bodies and with the carcases of horses. They were exposed to an oblique fire from the batteries on the hills on both sides, as well as to a direct fire of musketry. Through the clouds of smoke we could see their sabres flashing as they rode up to the guns and dashed between them, cutting down the gunners as they stood. We saw them riding through the guns, as I have said; to our delight we saw them returning, after breaking through a column of Russian infantry, and scattering them like chaff, when the flank fire of the battery on the hill swept them down, scattered and broken as they were. Wounded men and dismounted troopers flying towards us told the sad tale-demi-gods could not have done what we had failed to do. At the very moment when they were about to retreat an enormous mass of lancers was hurled on their flank. Colonel Shewell, of the 8th Hussars, saw the danger, and rode his few men straight at them, cutting his way through with fearful loss. The other regiments turned, and engaged in a desperate encounter. With courage too great almost for credence, they were breaking their way through the columns which enveloped them, when there took place an act of atrocity without parallel in the modern warfare of civilised nations. The Russian gunners, when the storm of cavalry passed, returned to their guns. They saw their own cavalry mingled with the troopers who had just ridden over them, and, to the eternal disgrace of the Russian name, the miscreants poured a murderous volley of grape and canister on the mass of struggling men and horses, mingling friend and foe in one common ruin! It was as much

as our heavy cavalry brigade could do to cover the retreat of the miserable remnants of that band of heroes as they returned to the place they had so lately quitted in all the pride of life. At thirty-five minutes past eleven not a British soldier, except the dead and dying, was left in front of these bloody Muscovite guns.—W. H. Russell.

141. THE RESPECT FOR WOMAN IN EARLY GRECIAN

LIFE.

Outside the pale of Christianity, it would be difficult to find a parallel, in point of elevation, to the Greek woman of the heroic age. Again, if the pictures presented by the historical books of the Old Testament and by Homer respectively be compared, candour will claim from us a verdict in favour of the position of the Greek as compared with that of the Hebrew woman. Among the Jews polygamy was permitted; to the Greeks it was unknown. Tales like that of Amnon and Tamar, or like that of the Levite and his concubine, are not found even among the deeds of the dissolute suitors of the Odyssey. Among the Jews the testimony of our Lord is that, because of the hardness of their hearts, Moses suffered them to put away their wives; but that 'from the beginning it was not so.' Apart from the violent contingencies of war, manners seem to have been, in the momentous point of divorce, not very different among the Greeks of the heroic age from what they had been in 'the beginning.' The picture of Penelope waiting for her husband through the creeping course of twenty years, and of Odysseus yearning in like manner for his wife, is one of the most remarkable in the whole history of human manners; and it would lose little, if anything, of its deeper significance and force, even if we believed that the persons whom the poet names Odysseus and Penelope have never lived: it must be observed, too, what, in the mind of Homer, constitutes the extraordinary virtue of the royal matron: it is not the refusal to marry another while her husband is alive, but her stubborn determination not to accept the apparently certain conclusion that he must have ceased to live. Not even the suitors suggest that, if he be indeed alive, any power can set her free. She is importuned, but she is not insulted. She feels horror and

aversion, but she has no cause for fear. Such, in the morning of Greek life, was the reverence that hedged a woman, as she sat alone and undefended in the midst of a body of powerful and abandoned men. Again: the famous scene of Hector and Andromache is not more touching by its immeasurable tenderness than it is important for the proof which it affords, with reference to the contemporary manners, of what may be called the moral equality of man and wife. And the general effect of the poem is, to give an idea of a social parity, and of a share borne by women in the practical and responsible duties of life, such as we seek in vain, notwithstanding some charming specimens of character, among the Jews.-Gladstone, The Place of Ancient Greece in the Providential Order of the World!

142. ST. PAUL AT ATHENS.

At Athens, at once the centre and capital of the Greek philosophy and Heathen superstition, takes place the first public and direct conflict between Christianity and Paganism. Up to this time there is no account of any one of the apostles taking his station in the public street or market-place, and addressing the general multitude. Their place of teaching had invariably been the synagogue of their nation, or, as at Philippi, the neighbourhood of their customary place of worship. Here, however, Paul does not confine himself to the synagogue, or to the society of his countrymen and their proselytes. He takes his stand in the public market-place (probably not the Ceramicus, but the Eretriac Forum), which, in the reign of Augustus, had begun to be more frequented, and at the top of which was the famous portico from which the Stoics assumed their name. In Athens, the appearance of a new public teacher, instead of offending the popular feelings, was too familiar to excite astonishment, and was rather welcomed as promising some fresh intellectual excitement. In Athens, hospitable to all religions and all opinions, the foreign and Asiatic appearance, and possibly the less polished tone and dialect of Paul, would only awaken the stronger curiosity. Though they affect at first (probably the philosophic part of his hearers) to treat him as an idle 'babbler,' and others (the vulgar, alarmed for the honour of their deities) supposed that he was about to introduce some new

religious worship which might endanger the supremacy of their own tutelar divinities, he is conveyed, not without respect, to a still more public and commodious place, from whence he may explain his doctrines to a numerous assembly without disturbance. On the Areopagus the Christian leader takes his stand, surrounded on every side with whatever was noble, beautiful, and intellectual in the olden world, -temples, of which the materials were surpassed only by the architectural grace and majesty; statues, in which the ideal anthropomorphism of the Greeks had almost elevated the popular notions of the Deity by embodying it in human forms of such exquisite perfection; public edifices, where the civil interests of man had been discussed with the acuteness and versatility of the highest Grecian intellect, in all the purity of the inimitable Attic dialect, when oratory had obtained its highest triumphs, by wielding at will the fierce democracy;' the walks of the philosophers, who unquestionably, by elevating the human mind to an appetite for new and nobler knowledge, had prepared the way for a loftier and purer religion. The opening of the apostle's speech is according to those most perfect rules of art which are but the expressions of the general sentiments of nature. It is calm, temperate, conciliatory. It is no fierce denunciation of idolatry, no contemptuous disdain of the prevalent philosophic opinions; it has nothing of the sternness of the ancient Jewish prophet, nor the taunting defiance of the later Christian polemic. 'Already the religious people of Athens had, unknowingly indeed, worshipped the universal Deity, for they had an altar to the unknown God. The nature, the attributes of this sublimer Being, hitherto adored in ignorant and unintelligent homage, he came to unfold. This God rose far above the popular notion; he could not be confined in altar or temple, or represented by any visible image. He was the universal father of mankind, even of the earth-born Athenians, who boasted that they were of an older race than the other families of man, and coeval with the world itself.' The next sentence, which asserted the providence of God, as the active, creative energy, as the conservative, the ruling, the ordaining principle, annihilated at once the atomic theory and the government of blind chance, to which Epicurus ascribed the origin and preservation of the universe. The great Christian doctrine of the resurrection closed the

speech of Paul; a doctrine received with mockery perhaps by his Epicurean hearers, with suspension of judgment probably by the Stoic, with whose theory of the final destruction of the world by fire, and his tenet of future retribution, it might appear in some degree to harmonise.

At Athens all this free discussion on topics relating to the religious and moral nature of man, and involving the authority of the existing religion, passed away without disturbance. The jealous reverence for the established faith, which, conspiring with its perpetual ally political faction, had in former times caused the death of Socrates, the exile of Stilpa, and the proscription of Diagoras the Melian, had long died away. With the loss of independence political animosities had subsided, and the toleration of philosophical and religious indifference allowed the utmost latitude to speculative inquiry, however ultimately dangerous to the whole fabric of the national religion. Yet Polytheism still reigned in Athens in its utmost splendour; the temples were maintained with the highest pomp; the Eleusinian mysteries, in which religion and philosophy had in some degree coalesced, attracted the noblest and the wisest of the Romans, who boasted of their initiation in these sublime secrets. Athens was thus at once the head-quarters of Paganism, and at the same time the place where Paganism most clearly betrayed its approaching dissolution.—Milman.

143. MARINO FALIERO TO THE CONSPIRATORS.

You see me here,

As one of you hath said, an old, unarmed,

Defenceless man; and yesterday you saw me

Presiding in the hall of ducal state,

Apparent sovereign of our hundred isles,
Robed in official purple, dealing out

The edicts of a power which is not mine,

Nor yours, but of your masters—the patricians.
Why I was there you know, or think you know;
Why I am here, he who hath been most wronged,
He who among you hath been most insulted,
Outraged, and trodden on, until he doubt
If he be worm or no, may answer for me,

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