Chapter 1

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GREAT MEN AND FAMOUS WOMEN

_A Series of Pen and Pencil Sketches of_

THE LIVES OF MORE THAN 200 OF THE MOST PROMINENT PERSONAGES IN HISTORY

VOL. III.

Copyright, 1894, BY SELMAR HESS

edited by Charles F. Horne

New-York: Selmar Hess Publisher

Copyright, 1894, by SELMAR HESS.

CONTENTS OF VOLUME III.

SUBJECT AUTHOR PAGE

ALFRED THE GREAT, _Sir J. Bernard Burke, LL.D._, 101 ST. AMBROSE, _Rev. A. Lambing, LL.D._, 68 ARCHIMEDES, _John Timbs, F.S.A._, 59 ARISTOTLE, _Fenelon_, 54 ST. AUGUSTINE OF CANTERBURY, _Rt. Rev. Henry Codman Potter_, 88 ST. AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO, _James, Cardinal Gibbons_, 73 FRANCIS BACON, _Hon. Ignatius Donnelly_, 154 WILLIAM BRADFORD, _Elbridge S. Brooks_, 172 AUGUSTUS CAESAR, 66 JOHN CALVIN, 140 CHARLES I. OF ENGLAND, _F. Hindes Groome_, 177 _Letter written on the eve of his execution by Charles I. to his son_, 180 CHARLES V. OF GERMANY, 133 MARCUS TULLIUS CICERO, _Rev. W. J. Brodribb_, 63 NICHOLAS COPERNICUS, _John Stoughton, D.D._, 122 OLIVER CROMWELL, _Lord Macaulay_, 181 DAVID, KING OF ISRAEL, _Margaret E. Sangster_, 10 DEMOSTHENES, _E. Benjamin Andrews_, 47 DIOGENES, _Fenelon_, 54 ELIZABETH, QUEEN OF ENGLAND, _Samuel L. Knapp_, 149 FREDERICK, THE GREAT ELECTOR, 189 GALILEO GALILEI, 161 JOHN HUSS, _Rev. Dr. Tweedy_, 106 ISABELLA OF CASTILE, _Sarah H. Killikelly_, 114 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT, 85 JOHN KNOX, _P. Hume Brown_, 144 LOUIS XI. OF FRANCE, _E. Spencer Biesly, M.A._, 111 LOUIS XIV., _Oliver Optic_, 192 MARTIN LUTHER, 127 _Letter of affection from Luther to his little son Hans_, 132 LYCURGUS, _Rev. Joseph T. Duryea_, 22 MAHOMET, 95 MOSES, _Henry George_, 1 ST. PATRICK, _Rev. G. F. Maclear, B.D._, 80 WILLIAM PENN, 200 PERICLES, 34 CARDINAL RICHELIEU, 166 SOCRATES, _Fenelon_, 38 SOLOMON, _Rev. Charles F. Deems_, 16 THEMISTOCLES, 29

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

VOLUME III.

PHOTOGRAVURES

ILLUSTRATION ARTIST TO FACE PAGE

JUSTINIAN AND HIS COUNCIL, _Benjamin Constant_ _Frontispiece_ MOSES IN THE BULRUSHES, _Paul Delaroche_ 2 THE VICTORS OF SALAMIS, _Fernand Cormon_ 32 DEMOSTHENES PRACTISING ORATORY, _Jules Jean Lecomte-du-Nouy_ 48 AUGUSTUS CAESAR AND CLEOPATRA, _August von Heckel_ 66 LOUIS XI. AND OLIVIER LE DAIN, _Hermann Kaulbach_ 112 MARTIN LUTHER BEFORE THE COUNCIL OF WORMS, _E. Delperte_ 130 CHARLES V. ON HIS WAY TO THE CONVENT, _Hermann Schneider_ 138 MOLIERE AT BREAKFAST WITH LOUIS XIV., _Jean Leon Gerome_ 198

WOOD-ENGRAVINGS AND TYPOGRAVURES

DAVID CALMING THE WRATH OF SAUL, _J. J. Lefebvre_ 12 JUDGMENT OF SOLOMON, _Jos. Fuehrich_ 18 DEATH OF SOCRATES, _Louis David_ 42 DIOGENES IN HIS TUB, _Jean Leon Gerome_ 44 DEATH OF ARCHIMEDES, _Gustave Courtois_ 60 AMBROSE REBUKES THEODOSIUS, _Peter Paul Rubens_ 72 ST. AUGUSTINE AND HIS MOTHER, ST. MONICA, _Ary Scheffer_ 74 ST. PATRICK JOURNEYING TO TARA, 82 CONVERSION OF ETHELBERT BY AUGUSTINE, _H. Tresham_ 92 THE MUEZZIN, _Jean Leon Gerome_ 100 KING ALFRED VISITING A MONASTERY SCHOOL, _Benziger_ 104 EXECUTION OF HUSS, _C. G. Hellquist_ 110 FERDINAND AND ISABELLA--THE SURRENDER OF GRANADA, _F. de Pradilla_ 120 COPERNICUS, _O. Brausewetter_ 124 LUTHER INTRODUCED TO THE HOME OF FRAU COTTA, _G. Spangenberg_ 128 ELIZABETH AND MARY STUART, _Hermann Kaulbach_ 152 GALILEO BEFORE THE INQUISITION, 164 A CONCERT AT RICHELIEU'S PALACE, _J. Leisten_ 172 A PURITAN CHRISTMAS, _Hyde_ 174 PRINCESS ELIZABETH IN PRISON, _J. Everett Millais_ 180 CROMWELL'S DAUGHTER ENTREATS HIM TO REFUSE THE CROWN 186 THE GREAT ELECTOR WITHDRAWS FROM THE ASSOCIATION OF THE DUTCH NOBILITY, _F. Neuhaus_ 190

STATESMEN AND SAGES

Lives of great men all remind us, We can make our lives sublime, And departing, leave behind us Footprints on the sands of time.

--LONGFELLOW

MOSES[1]

By HENRY GEORGE

(1571-1451 B.C.)

[Footnote 1: Copyright. 1894. by Selmar Hess.]

Three great religions place the leader of the Exodus upon the highest plane they allot to man. To Christendom and to Islam, as well as to Judaism, Moses is the mouthpiece of the Most High; the medium, clothed with supernatural powers, through which the Divine Will has spoken. Yet this very exaltation, by raising him above comparison, may prevent the real grandeur of the man from being seen. It is amid his brethren that Saul stands taller and fairer.

On the other hand, the latest school of Biblical criticism asserts that the books and legislation attributed to Moses are really the product of an age subsequent to that of the prophets. Yet to this Moses, looming vague and dim, of whom they can tell us almost nothing, they, too, attribute the beginning of that growth which flowered centuries after in the humanities of Jewish law, and again, higher still and fairer, gleamed forth in that star of spiritual light which rested over the stable of Bethlehem, in Judea.

But whether wont to look on Moses in this way or in that, it may be sometimes worth our while to take the point of view in which all shades of belief may find common ground, and accepting the main features of Hebrew record,[2] consider them in the light of history, and of human nature as it shows itself to-day. Here is a case in which sacred history may be treated as we would treat profane history without any shock to religious feeling. The keenest criticism cannot resolve Moses into a myth. The fact of the Exodus presupposes such a leader.

[Footnote 2: Moses, the lawgiver of the Hebrew people, was, according to the Biblical account, an Israelite of the tribe of Levi, and the son of Amram and Jochebed. He was born in Egypt, in the year 1571 B.C., according to the common chronology. To evade the edict of Pharaoh, the King of Egypt, that all the male children of the Hebrews should be killed, he was hid by his mother three months, and then exposed in an ark of rushes on the banks of the Nile. Here the child was found by Pharaoh's daughter, who adopted him for her son, entrusting him to his own mother to nurse, by which circumstance he was preserved from being entirely separated from his own people. He was probably educated at the Egyptian court, where he became "learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians." At the age of forty years Moses conceived the idea of freeing his Hebrew brethren from their bondage in Egypt, and on one occasion, seeing an Egyptian maltreating an Israelite, he interfered, slew the Egyptian, and buried him in the sand. The next day, upon his attempting to reconcile two Hebrews who had quarrelled, his services were scornfully rejected, and he was upbraided with the murder of the Egyptian. Finding that his secret was known, he fled from Egypt, and took refuge with a tribe of Midianites in Arabia Petraea, among whom he lived as a shepherd forty years, having married the daughter of their priest Jethro or Reuel.

As Moses led his father-in-law's flocks in the desert of Sinai, God appeared to him at Mount Horeb in a bush which burnt with fire, but was not consumed, and commanded him to return to Egypt and lead out his people thence into the land of Canaan. On his arrival in Egypt, the Israelites accepted him as their deliverer and after bringing ten miraculous plagues upon the land of Egypt before he could gain Pharaoh's consent to the departure of the people, he led them out through the Red Sea, which was miraculously divided for their passage, into the peninsula of Sinai. While the people were encamped at the foot of Sinai, God delivered to them through Moses the law which, with some additions and alterations, was ever after observed as their national code. After leading the Israelites through the wilderness for forty years, Moses appointed Joshua as his successor in the command over them, and died at the age of one hundred and twenty years, on Mount Pisgah, on the east side of the River Jordan, having first been permitted to view the land of Canaan from its summit. God buried him in the valley of Bethpeor, in the land of Moab, but his tomb was never made known.]

To lead into freedom a people long crushed by tyranny; to discipline and order such a mighty host; to harden them into fighting men, before whom warlike tribes quailed and walled cities went down; to repress discontent and jealousy and mutiny; to combat reactions and reversions; to turn the quick, fierce flame of enthusiasm to the service of a steady purpose, require some towering character--a character blending in highest expression the qualities of politician, patriot, philosopher, and statesman.

Such a character in rough but strong outline the tradition shows us--the union of the wisdom of the Egyptians with the unselfish devotion of the meekest of men. From first to last, in every glimpse we get, this character is consistent with itself, and with the mighty work which is its monument. It is the character of a great mind, hemmed in by conditions and limitations, and working with such forces and materials as were at hand--accomplishing, yet failing. Behind grand deed, a grander thought. Behind high performance, the still nobler ideal.

Egypt was the mould of the Hebrew nation--the matrix in which a single family, or, at most, a small tribe, grew to a people as numerous as the American people at the time of the Declaration of Independence. For four centuries, according to the Hebrew tradition--a period as long as America has been known to Europe--this growing people, coming a patriarchal family from a roving, pastoral life, had been placed under the dominance of a highly developed and ancient civilization--a civilization symbolized by monuments that rival in endurance the everlasting hills; a civilization so ancient that the Pyramids, as we now know, were hoary with centuries ere Abraham looked on them.

No matter how clearly the descendants of the kinsmen who came into Egypt at the invitation of the boy-slave become prime minister, maintained the distinction of race, and the traditions of a freer life, they must have been powerfully affected by such a civilization; and just as the Hebrews of to-day are Polish in Poland, German in Germany, and American in the United States, so, but far more clearly and strongly, the Hebrews of the Exodus must have been Egyptian.

It is not remarkable, therefore, that the ancient Hebrew institutions show in so many points the influence of Egyptian ideas and customs. What is remarkable is the dissimilarity. To the unreflecting nothing may seem more natural than that a people, in turning their back upon a land where they had been long oppressed, should discard its ideas and institutions. But the student of history, the observer of politics, know that nothing is more _un_natural. For "institutions make men." And when amid a people used to institutions of one kind, we see suddenly arise institutions of an opposite kind, we know that behind them must be that active, that initiative force--the "men who in the beginnings make institutions."

This is what occurs in the Exodus. The striking differences between Egyptian and Hebrew policy are not of form but of essence. The tendency of the one is to subordination and oppression; of the other, to individual freedom. Strangest of recorded births! from out the strongest and most splendid despotism of antiquity comes the freest republic. From between the paws of the rock-hewn Sphinx rises the genius of human liberty, and the trumpets of the Exodus throb with the defiant proclamation of the rights of man.

Consider what Egypt was. The very grandeur of her monuments testify to the enslavement of the people--are the enduring witnesses of a social organization that rested on the masses an immovable weight. That narrow Nile Valley, the cradle of the arts and sciences, the scene, perhaps, of the greatest triumphs of the human mind, is also the scene of its most abject enslavement. In the long centuries of its splendor its lord, secure in the possession of irresistible temporal power, and securer still in the awful sanctions of a mystical religion, was as a god on earth, to cover whose poor carcass with a tomb befitting his state hundreds of thousands toiled away their lives. For the classes who came next to him were all the sensuous delights of a most luxurious civilization, and high intellectual pleasures which the mysteries of the temple hid from vulgar profanation. But for the millions who constituted the base of the social pyramid there was but the lash to stimulate their toil, and the worship of beasts to satisfy the yearnings of the soul. From time immemorial to the present day the lot of the Egyptian peasant has been to work and to starve, that those above him might live daintily. He has never rebelled. The spirit for that was long ago crushed out of him by institutions which made him what he is. He knows but to suffer and to die.

Imagine what opportune circumstances we may, yet to organize and carry on a movement resulting in the release of a great people from such a soul-subduing tyranny, backed by an army of half a million highly trained soldiers, requires a leadership of most commanding and consummate genius. But this task, surpassingly great though it is, is not the measure of the greatness of the leader of the Exodus. It is not in the deliverance from Egypt, it is in the constructive statesmanship that laid the foundations of the Hebrew commonwealth that the superlative grandeur of that leadership looms up. As we cannot imagine the Exodus without the great leader, neither can we account for the Hebrew polity without the great statesman. Not merely intellectually great, but morally great--a statesman aglow with the unselfish patriotism that refuses to grasp a sceptre or found a dynasty.

It matters not when or by whom were compiled the books popularly attributed to Moses; it matters not how much of the code there given may be the survivals of more ancient usage or the amplifications of a later age; its great features bear the stamp of a mind far in advance of people and time, of a mind that beneath effects sought for causes, of a mind that drifted not with the tide of events, but aimed at a definite purpose.

The outlines that the record gives us of the character of Moses--the brief relations that wherever the Hebrew scriptures are read have hung the chambers of the imagination with vivid pictures--are in every way consistent with this idea. What we know of the life illustrates what we know of the work. What we know of the work illumines the life.

It was not an empire such as had reached full development in Egypt or existed in rudimentary patriarchal form in the tribes around, that Moses aimed to found. Nor was it a republic where the freedom of the citizen rested on the servitude of the helot, and the individual was sacrificed to the state. It was a commonwealth based upon the individual; a commonwealth whose ideal it was that every man should sit under his own vine and fig-tree, with none to vex him or make him afraid; a commonwealth in which none should be condemned to ceaseless toil; in which, for even the bond slave, there should be hope; in which, for even the beast of burden, there should be rest. A commonwealth in which, in the absence of deep poverty, the manly virtues that spring from personal independence should harden into a national character; a commonwealth in which the family affections might knit their tendrils around each member, binding with links stronger than steel the various parts into the living whole.

It is not the protection of property, but the protection of humanity, that is the aim of the Mosaic code. Its sanctions are not directed to securing the strong in heaping up wealth, so much as to preventing the weak from being crowded to the wall. At every point it interposes its barriers to the selfish greed that, if left unchecked, will surely differentiate men into landlord and serf, capitalist and workman, millionaire and tramp, ruler and ruled. Its Sabbath day and Sabbath year secure, even to the lowliest, rest and leisure. With the blast of the Jubilee trumpets the slave goes free, the debt that cannot be paid is cancelled, and a re-division of the land secures again to the poorest his fair share in the bounty of the common Creator. The reaper must leave something for the gleaner; even the ox cannot be muzzled as he treadeth out the corn. Everywhere, in everything, the dominant idea is that of our homely phrase--"Live and let live!"

And the religion with which this civil policy is so closely intertwined exhibits kindred features--from the idea of the brotherhood of man springs the idea of the fatherhood of God. Though the forms may resemble those of Egypt, the spirit is that which Egypt had lost; though a hereditary priesthood is retained, the law in its fulness is announced to all the people. Though the Egyptian rite of circumcision is preserved, and the Egyptian symbols reappear in all the externals of worship, the tendency to take the type for the reality is sternly repressed. It is only when we think of the bulls and the hawks, of the deified cats and sacred ichneumons of Egypt, that we realize the full meaning of the command--"Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven image!"

And if we seek, beneath form and symbol and command, the thought of which they are but the expression, we find that the distinctive feature of the Hebrew religion, that which separates it by such a wide gulf from the religions amid which it grew up, is its utilitarianism, its recognition of divine law in human life. It asserts, not a God whose domain is confined to the far-off beginning or the vague future, who is over and above and beyond men, but a God who in His inexorable laws is here and now; a God of the living as well as of the dead; a God of the market-place as well as of the temple; a God whose judgments wait not another world for execution, but whose immutable decrees will, in this life, give happiness to the people that heed them and bring misery upon the people that forget them.

The absence in the Mosaic books of any reference to a future life is only intelligible by the prominence into which this truth is brought. Nothing could have been more familiar to the Hebrews of the Exodus than the doctrine of immortality. The continued existence of the soul, the judgment after death, the rewards and punishments of the future state, were the constant subjects of Egyptian thought and art. But a truth may be hidden or thrown into the background by the intensity with which another truth is grasped. And the truth that Moses brought so prominently forward, the truth his gaze was concentrated upon, is a truth that has often been thrust aside by the doctrine of immortality, and that may perhaps, at times, react on it in the same way. This is the truth that the actions of men bear fruit in this world, that though on the petty scale of individual life wickedness may seem to go unpunished and wrong to be rewarded, there is yet a Nemesis that with tireless feet and pitiless arm follows every national crime, and smites the children for the father's transgression; the truth that each individual must act upon and be acted upon by the society of which he is a part; that all must in some degree suffer for the sin of each, and the life of each be dominated by the conditions imposed by all.

It is the intense appreciation of this truth that gives the Mosaic institutions so practical and utilitarian a character. Their genius, if I may so speak, leaves the abstract speculations where thought so easily loses and wastes itself, or finds expression only in symbols that become finally but the basis of superstition, in order that it may concentrate attention upon laws that determine the happiness or misery of men upon this earth. Its lessons have never tended to the essential selfishness of asceticism, which is so prominent a feature in Brahmanism and Buddhism, and from which Christianity and Islamism have not been exempt. Its injunction has never been, "Leave the world to itself that you may save your own soul," but rather, "Do your duty in the world that you may be happier and the world be better." It has disdained no sanitary regulation that might secure the health of the body. Its promise has been of peace and plenty and length of days, of stalwart sons and comely daughters.