dating accomplice: Mosby has only to say the word, and it shall be done.

It was a favourite trick with the Sicarii, or Assassins, the most extravagant of the school of Judas the Galilean, to make the Temple itself no place of safety for worshippers in those troublous times: for all the worshipper knew, the man who knelt by his side was preparing to plunge a dagger to his heart. During the conflicts of the factions, the Zealots being unhampered by religious scruples, clouds of missiles were continually discharged into the inner court of the Temple, and the whole sacred pavement was strewn with dead bodies. Milman refers to it as a strange feature in this fearful contest, that the religious ceremonies still went on upon the altar, which was often encircled with the dead. Visitors and strangers from afar would pass over pavement slippery with human blood, and themselves pay with their lives the price of kneeling and worshipping in the sacred place. At the siege of the Temple, in A.D. 70, men with swords reeking with blood rushed to and fro along the Holy Place, or even the Holy of Holies,—the very Romans are said to have shuddered at the profanation, and Titus protested with vigour against this Jewish violation of the Jewish sanctuary, by thus defiling it with blood and carnage. Was the house of Jehovah, then, to become a shambles? Was there to be no sanctuary, where man's life should be safe,-no sanctity, where God's honour was concerned?

The Pazzi conspiracy, designed to overthrow the power of the Medici, and to substitute the rule of another faction and family, is alleged to have been deliberately planned at Rome in the Papal counsels; the Pope's nephew being the prime mover, the leading agent an archbishop, and the means of the revolution foul murder. The place of that murder, pointedly writes Dean Milman, was the great church of Florence, the time of that murder the celebration of the Mass, the signal for that murder the elevation of the Host, the presentation to the adoring people (as all believed) of the God of mercy and love. "Lorenzo saw the dagger driven home to the heart of his brother Giuliano; but escaped himself by a strange accident,"

-to wit, that the ruffian to whom his death was assigned, a man whose hands were dyed with a hundred murders, and who was inured to the death-shriek of innocent men, scrupled at his task; he would not murder in a church. "A priest was easily found with none of these compunctious visitings; but the priest's hand was feeble and unpractised, and Lorenzo came off with a slight wound. The Pope's complicity is beyond all doubt." Ranke speaks of Alexander VI. as not only cognizant of the Pazzi conspiracy, but in the secret of the murder which these men perpetrated before the altar of the cathedral-he the Father of the Faithful.

Stigmatized by South as diabolical in its malice is the revenge taken by "that wretch who made a poor captive renounce his religion, in order to the saving of his life; and when he had so done, presently ran him through, glorying that he had thereby destroyed his enemy, both body and soul." Roderick Random's literary patroness thought she had made a masterstroke in planning a tragedy, the subject of which should be the murder of a prince before the altar, while busy at his devotions. Desperate as John Chiesley of Dalry was, in scheming the murder of Sir George Lockhart, his design to shoot the judge while attending upon divine service was not carried out,—some feeling as to the sanctity of the place restraining him, if not any care for the soul of the President of the Court of Session: the High Street, and not the High Church, of Edinburgh became accordingly the scene of murder. The fate of Captain Porteous, in the following century, supplied Sir Walter Scott with material for illustrating the vehemence of vengeance which refuses time and scope for a soul's salvation: the pastor's pleading voice to the mob, "We will not kill both his soul and body," being drowned in the clamour for instant execution. In Victor Hugo's grotesquely unhistorical Cromwell, the conspiratorssome of them. at least―propose to slay Oliver and his bodyguard as they kneel in prayer:

"Ils sont tous à genou, le tyran et sa garde;

Que ne frappons-nous? Dieu !--Le frapper quand il prie !" etc. Hamlet subtilizes with a devilish refinement of calculating

vindictiveness on the expediency or otherwise of despatching Claudius while that wicked king is on his knees in prayer.*

"Now might I do it, pat, now he is praying;

And now I'll do't; and so he goes to heaven:
And so am I revenged? That would be scann'd;
[For] . . . am I then revenged

To take him in the purging of his soul,

When he is fit and season'd for his passage?

No.-Up, sword; and know thou a more horrid hent;
When he is drunk, asleep, or in his rage;

At gaming, swearing; or about some act

That has no relish of salvation in't :

Then trip him, that his heels may kick at heaven,'

and vengeance be complete not only on body but on soul.†

* The Princess Cloelia, in Mr. C. Reade's powerful story of the times of Erasmus, having occasion to hire a bravo in the Eternal City, is instructed by that worthy in the distinctive grades of greater and lesser vendetta. "The lesser vendetta, lady, is the death of the body only. We watch our man come out of church; or take him in an innocent hour; and so deal, with him. In the greater vendetta we watch him, and catch him hot from some unrepented sin, and so slay his soul as well as body. But this vendetta is not so run upon now as it was a few years ago."—The Cloister and the Hearth, vol. iii., ch. xv.

† Hartley Coleridge characterized this as a speech which Shakspeare, had he lived in these days, would not have written-nor indeed would, in his own day, have put into the mouth of Hamlet, had he meant to represent him as a sane and exemplary youth. "Yet I know not whether the notion of retributive revenge as a propitiation to the departed, will not justify this horrid scruple. The speech, whatever it were meant for, certainly is a tremendous satire on revenge." The same critic, writing for once at least in the Noctes Ambrosiana, under the name and in the style of Christopher North himself, (and John Wilson would have welcomed his endeared Hartley to play that part very much oftener,) described Hamlet as vindicating his adjournment of vengeance on the King by arguments which certainly "have no relish of salvation in them," but which, perhaps, sounded less impious in an age when every staunch Protestant, no less than orthodox Roman Catholic, thought himself bound to believe in the eternal perdition of his dissentient neighbours.

The excellent critic who wrote Shakspeare in Germany, held that in all these purposes of refined and fearful revenge Hamlet is in truth representing his own state of mind and his own determination as darker and more hideous than they are could we believe them real, our pity for him would merge

XIX.

CLEAN FORGOTTEN, AS A DEAD MAN OUT OF MIND.

TH

PSALM XXXI. 14 (English Prayer Book version).

HIS, among the more salient indications of his overclouded lot, the Psalmist deplored: that already was he forgotten by acquaintance and friends,-clean forgotten, as a dead man out of mind. As in the words of another Psalm, if not of another Psalmist, he was "counted as one of them that go down into the pit," "free among the dead, like unto them that . . . lie in the grave, who are out of remembrance." The oblivion might be construed from the language of Bildad the Shuhite concerning one who is destroyed from his place, and then it shall deny him, saying, I have not seen thee. Behold, this is the joy of his way, and out of the earth shall others grow. The race endures, but the individual man dies out, and, being dead, is soon forgotten. Out of sight, out of mind. And yet, "Absence and Death, how differ they!" the poet exclaims. And if, living, but absent, and so out of sight, is to be out of mind, how much more is the dead and gone to be beyond ordinary remembrance-forgotten, clean forgotten, as a dead man out of mind!

The pathetic exhortations on country tombstones, "Grieve not for me, my wife and children dear," etc., are all too truly said to be for the most part speedily complied with: we do not leave so great a void in society as we are inclined to imagine, partly to magnify our own importance, and partly to console ourselves by sympathy. Even in the same family, as Hazlitt says, the gap is not so great; the wound closes up sooner than we should expect; nay, our "room" is not unfrequently thought better than our company." People walk along the streets the day after our deaths just as they did before, and the crowd is not diminished. The same moralist accounts it amazing how

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in horror and disgust: but he is trying to excuse his delay and irresolution, even to his own mind, by dwelling on the more complete and awful vengeance which the future may afford.

soon the rich and titled, and even some of those who have wielded great political power, are forgotten. "A little rule, a little sway, Is all the great and mighty have Betwixt the cradle and the grave"-and, after its short date, they hardly leave a name behind them. "A great man's memory may, at the common rate, survive him half a year." Why be surprised that those are forgotten so much sooner after quitting this mortal stage, who are scarcely noticed while upon it? Leave your place in the world for ten minutes, and when you come back some one else has taken it, Mrs. Colonel Poyntz remarks; but when you leave the world for good, who remembers that you had ever a place even in the parish register?* Apemantus cynically assures the recluse in his cave,

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Thy flatterers yet wear silk, drink wine, lie soft,
Hug their diseased perfumes, and have forgot
That ever Timon was."

To La Bruyère's mortifying query there is no complacent answer easily forthcoming: "Qui peut, avec les plus rares talens et le plus excellent mérite, n'être pas convaincu de son inutilité, quand il considére qu'il laisse, en mourant, un monde qui ne

"It is very mournful, yet not useless, to see and know, how the Greatest and Dearest, in a short while, would find his place quite filled up here, and no room for him."—Sartor Resartus, book i., chap. vii.

Ah, mes amis, sighs a commonplace philosopher, after we die, it would not be expedient, even if it were possible, to come back: many of us would not like to find how little they miss us. Few, once observed Sydney Smith, have the plain sense to see that they must soon be inevitably forgotten,—or the fortitude to bear it when, yet alive, they are. They represent to themselves imaginary scenes of deploring friends and dispirited companies-but the ocean might as well regret the drops exhaled by the sunbeams. Life goes on; and whether the absent have retired into a cottage or a grave, is much the same thing. De non apparentibus et non existentibus eadem est ratio. Whoever, remarks one of Jeremy Taylor's biographers, has revisited scenes and persons from whom he had long been separated, must have sighed over the comparative indifference that welcomed his return other associations have effaced his own: the most familiar door turns upon a rusty hinge; and little remains for him but to moralize over the fragility of the structure which expectation builds. Redux Rip Van Winkle's "How soon we are forcot !" speaks homely and homeless pathos both in one.