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H

XV.

ZIMRI'S END.

1 KINGS XVI. 18.

AD Zimri peace, who slew his master?* Jezebel from the window cried that question to Jehu. But Jehu was not the man to be daunted by such questioning. Not long afterwards we hear him saying to all the people, “ Behold, I conspired against my master, and slew him,”—and a good thing too, he seems to say, and to wish them to join him in saying. He hoped for another sort of career than that of Zimri, and another sort of ending to it. Zimri was servant and captain under Elah, king of Israel, and conspired against him as he was in Tirzah, drinking himself drunk in the house of his steward. “And Zimri went in and smote him, and killed him," and reigned in his stead. And all the house of Elah he destroyed. But there was to be nothing of prosperity or peace for Zimri. For all Israel made Omri, the captain of the host, king over Israel that day in the camp; and Omri went up, and all Israel with him, and besieged Tirzah. “And it came to pass, when Zimri saw that the city was taken, that he went into the palace of the king's house, and burnt the king's house over him with fire, and died.”

During the first period of the Civil Wars of Rome, Judacilius, finding that he could hold Asculum no longer, raised a funeral

*

Spenser was sounding the depths of early English history when he told how

"'gan Carausius tyrannize anew,—

But him Allectus treacherously slew,

And tooke on him the robe of emperoure;

Nath'lesse the same enjoyed but short happy howre,

For Asclepiodate him overcame,

And left inglorious on the vanquisht playne,

Without or robe or rag to hide his shame;

And afterwards he in his stead did raigne."

Had Zimri peace? had Allectus? To Don Carlos in Schiller is pointed the like moral when Lerma warns him, "Undertake no bloody deed against your father, Prince!"

"Philip compell'd his father to yield up

The throne to him; and this same Philip now
Trembles at his own son.

pile in sight of his banqueting-hall, and after a sumptuous entertainment given to his friends, drained a poisoned cup of wine to its dregs, ascended the pile, and bade his guests set fire to it. At the close of the siege of Masada, we find Eleazar, worthy descendant of Judas the Galilean, proposing to his followers to set the city on fire, and perish together, with their wives unviolated, their children free from captivity, on that noble funeral pile. And stirring is the story of their resolute fulfilment of the design-the multitude vying with each other in eagerness to begin on the instant the work of self-devotion, and loyally carrying out the internecine plan, until there was a last man left, who, after he had carefully searched whether there was any more work for him to do, seized a lighted brand, set fire to the palace, and then, with unflinching hand, drove the sword to his own heart.

At the siege by Cimon of Eion in Thrace, garrisoned under a Persian noble, the commandant collected his treasure on a pile of wood, which mounting with his slaves, women, and children, he set fire to it—a mode of suicide then accepted as orthodox in the East. Plutarch gives in detail, in his Life of Alexander, the characteristic circumstances of the death of Callanus-how he caused his funeral pile to be erected, approached it on horseback, poured the libations on himself, and taking leave of the Macedonians, desired them to spend the day in jollity and drinking with the king-then stretched himself on the pile, and welcomed the flames.

In Trajan's time, the final defeat of the Dacians was effected when the hill fort in which resided their chieftain, Decebalus, was stormed after a desperate resistance: Decebalus fell on his own sword amidst the ruins of his capital, and the nobles of the conquered land followed the example of their sovereign, first firing their houses, and then handing round the poisoned bowl.*

*

"Such is the scene represented on the column at Rome, which still records in monumental sculpture the chief features of this memorable struggle."-Merivale, History of the Romans under the Empire, vol. vii.,

p. 239.

In the days of the massacre of the Jews in York, a number of the besieged, at the bidding of their Rabbi, collected their most precious effects, burned all that was combustible, and buried the rest; then set fire to the castle in many places, cut the throats of their wives and children, and, that done, their

own.

Whatever the century in which such acts occur, it may seem to be so far safe from Mr. Carlyle's derision or disdain of the eighteenth, which to him has nothing grand in it, except what he calls that grand universal Suicide, named French Revolution, by which it terminated "its otherwise worthless existence with at least one worthy act;-setting fire to its old home and self; and going up in flames and volcanic explosions, in a truly memorable and important manner."

But to go on with our historical illustrations and parallels. At the battle of Chalons, Attila had provided for the worst, by collecting into a funeral pile the saddles and rich furniture of the cavalry-that magnanimous barbarian having resolved, if his entrenchments should be forced, to rush headlong into the flames, and so deprive his enemies of the glory which they might have acquired by the death or captivity of Attila. Both the friends and the enemies of Chosroes were persuaded of his intention to bury himself under the ruins of his city and palace of Dastagerd. But he disappointed them all, and proved how much there was of a difference in him, not however for the better, from

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ces rois d'Assyrie

Qui traînaient au tombeau femmes, enfans, patrie,

Et ne savaient pas mourir seuls :

Qui jetaient au bûcher, avant que d'y descendre,
Famille, amis, coursiers, trésors reduits en cendre,
Espoir ou souvenirs de leurs jours plus heureux,
Et livrant leur empire et leurs dieux à la flamme,
Auraient voulu qu'aussi l'univers n'eût qu'une ame
Pour que tout mourût avec eux ! " *

* In Mr. Wilkie Collins's Antonina, or, The Fall of Rome, Vetranio promises himself and his guests that the last banquet given in Rome, ere the city is annihilated, shall be his. The Goths and the famine shall have

The Veiled Prophet, Hakem Ben Haschem, besieged in Nekhscheb, and reduced to despair, is said to have poisoned his seïdes at a banquet, and "exploded" himself and his. belongings in a cellar filled with combustibles-from which general explosion his horses, and one concubine out of the many, managed somehow to escape. In an imaginary conversation between Metellus and Marius, Landor pictures with telling suggestiveness the voluntary holocaust of the Numantians the assembled inhabitants, about the altar? no, upon it: "It blazed under them and over them and round about them." The catastrophe of the Siege of Corinth is told in Byron's most vigorous manner,—Minotti's last and stern resource,—and old Minotti's was the hand to fire the train. 'Tis fired:

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Spire, vaults, the shrine, the spoil, the slain,

The turban'd victors, the Christian band,

All that living or dead remain,

Hurl'd on high with the shiver'd fane,
In one wild roar expired!"

With equal resolve perished the Dutch Vice-Admiral Klaaszoon, in 1606, after drifting about for two whole days in his crippled ship. With his surviving officers and men he knelt upon the deck, and prayed a last prayer; with his own hand he then lighted the powder magazine, and the ship was blown into the air.

In the Guadaloupe revolt of 1801, Delgrasse blew himself up, with three hundred of his followers, rather than surrender to the enemy. In 1808, the Grand Vizier Bairakdar, defeated by the Janissaries, himself set fire to a powder magazine,

no part in his death. Pleasure shall preside at his last moments, as over his whole previous life. "I will die like Sardanapalus, with my loves and my treasures around me; and the last of my guests who remains proof against our festivity, shall set fire to my palace, as the kingly Assyrian set fire to his." He makes his last oration as the host of the Banquet of Famine, and demands who would sink ignobly beneath the slow superiority of famine, or perish under the quickly-glancing steel of the barbarian conqueror's sword, when such a death is offered to the choice-when wine flows bright, to drown sensation in oblivion, and a palace and its treasures furnish alike the scene of the revel and the radiant funeral pile.

which he had provided as a last resource against his enemies, and, with his whole household, was blown into the air. Ali Pacha, in 1822, found or meant to find his last resource in a tower three storeys in height-the uppermost one housing himself, his harem, and fifty armed followers-the second, his treasures-and the lowest forming a powder magazine, at the door of which a trusty guardian was stationed, with a lighted match in his hand. The Pacha, if it came to the worst, would perish en roi:

"Et s'il me faut tomber, eh bien ! tombant en roi,*

Que toute ma maison s'engloutisse avec moi!"

A salient contrast we see between the great Mahmoud who first styled himself Sultan, and the voluptuary Sardanapalus, in the recorded close of their respective lives, so far as the treatment of their treasures is concerned;-Mahmoud ordering all his costliest apparel, and his vessels of silver and gold, and his pearls and precious stones, the inestimable spoils of the East, to be displayed before him: to what end? that he might weep like a child at having to die and leave them ;-Sardanapalus collecting his, to be consumed with himself and his household, in one fiery mass: he would have one banquet more, and there an end: the banquet over, he would rejoin his fathers, with what was left of their squandered treasures :

*

"And the light of this

Most royal of funereal pyres shall be

So we read of Arbaces the Egyptian : "He resolved to crowd, monarch-like, on his funeral pyre, all that his soul held most dear."Last Days of Pompeii, bk. ii., ch. viii. The penultimate chapter of John Marchmont's Legacy is entitled "A Modern Sardanapalus ;" and it tells how Paul Marchmont, having systematically lived for a year past like that Assyrian prince, resolves to die like him; and heaps together accordingly all his treasures of art. "I will die like Sardanapalus. The King Arbaces shall never rest in the palace I have beautified.

"Now order here

Fagots, pine-nuts, and wither'd leaves, and such
Things as catch fire with one sole spark.
Bring cedar, too, and precious drugs and spices,

And mighty planks, to nourish a tall pile;
Bring frankincense and myrrh too, for t
For a great sacrifice I build the pyre."

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