Part 3

The eyes of the crowd followed the gesture of the Egyptian, and beheld with dismay a vast vapor shooting from the summit of Vesuvius in the form of a gigantic pine-tree; the trunk, blackness--the breaches fire!--a fire that shifted and wavered in its hues with every moment, now fiercely luminous, now of a dull and dying red, that again blazed terrifically forth with intolerable glare!

There was a dead, heart-sunken silence; through which there suddenly broke the roar of the lion, which was echoed back from within the building by the sharper and fiercer yells of its fellow beasts. Dread seers were they of the Burden of the Atmosphere, and wild prophets of the wrath to come!

Then there arose on high the universal shrieks of women; the men stared at each other, but were dumb. At that moment they felt the earth shake under their feet; the walls of the theater trembled; and beyond in the distance they heard the crash of falling roofs; an instant more, and the mountain cloud seemed to roll toward them, dark and rapid, like a torrent; at the same time it cast forth from its bosom a shower of ashes mixt with vast fragments of burning stone! Over the crushing vines, over the desolate streets, over the amphitheater itself; far and wide, with many a mighty splash in the agitated sea, fell that awful shower!

No longer thought the crowd of justice or of Arbaces; safety for themselves was their sole thought. Each turned to fly--each dashing, pressing, crushing against the other. Trampling recklessly over the fallen, amid groans and oaths and prayers and sudden shrieks, the enormous crowd vomited itself forth through the numerous passages. Whither should they fly? Some, anticipating a second earthquake, hastened to their homes to load themselves with their more costly goods and escape while it was yet time; others, dreading the showers of ashes that now fell fast, torrent upon torrent, over the streets, rushed under the roofs of the nearest houses, or temples, or sheds--shelter of any kind--for protection from the terrors of the open air. But darker, and larger, and mightier, spread the cloud above them. It was a sudden and more ghastly Night rushing upon the realm of Noon!

LORD BEACONSFIELD

Born in 1804, died in 1881; son of Isaac D'Israeli; entered Parliament in 1837, where he opposed Peel; Chancellor of Exchequer and leader of the House in 1852, and again in 1858; Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1866; carried the Reform bill of 1867; Prime Minister in 1868, and again in 1874-80; made Earl of Beaconsfield in 1876; plenipotentiary at the Congress of Berlin in 1878; published several novels, including "Vivian Gray" (1826), "Henrietta Temple" (1837), "Coningsby" (1844), "Sybil" (1845), "Tancred" (1847), and "Endymion" (1880).

JERUSALEM BY MOONLIGHT[12]

The broad moon lingers on the summit of Mount Olivet, but its beam has long left the garden of Gethsemane and the tomb of Absalom, the waters of Kedron and the dark abyss of Jehoshaphat. Full falls its splendor, however, on the opposite city, vivid and defined in its silver blaze. A lofty wall, with turrets and towers, and frequent gates, undulates with the unequal ground which it covers, as it encircles the lost capital of Jehovah. It is a city of hills far more famous than those of Rome: for all Europe has heard of Zion and of Calvary, while the Arab and the Assyrian, and the tribes and nations beyond, are as ignorant of the Capitoline and Aventine mounts as they are of the Malvern or the Chiltern hills.

[Footnote 12: From "Tancred."]

The broad steep of Zion crowned with the tower of David; nearer still, Mount Moriah, with the gorgeous temple of the God of Abraham, but, built, alas! by the child of Hagar, and not by Sarah's chosen one; close to its cedars and its cypresses, its lofty spires and airy arches, the moonlight falls upon Bethesda's pool; further on, entered by the gate of St. Stephen, the eye, tho 'tis the noon of night, traces with ease the Street of Grief, a long winding ascent to a vast cupolaed pile that now covers Calvary--called the Street of Grief, because there the most illustrious of the human, as well as of the Hebrew race, the descendant of King David, and the divine son of the most favored of women, twice sank under that burden of suffering and shame which is now throughout all Christendom the emblem of triumph and of honor; passing over groups and masses of houses built of stone, with terraced roofs, or surmounted with small domes, we reach the hill of Salem, where Melchisedek built his mystic citadel; and still remains the hill of Scopas, where Titus gazed upon Jerusalem on the eve of his final assault. Titus destroyed the temple. The religion of Judea has in turn subverted the fanes which were raised to his father and to himself in their imperial capital; and the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob is now worshiped before every altar in Rome.

Jerusalem by moonlight! 'Tis a fine spectacle, apart from all its indissoluble associations of awe and beauty. The mitigating hour softens the austerity of a mountain landscape magnificent in outline, however harsh and severe in detail; and, while it retains all its sublimity, removes much of the savage sternness of the strange and unrivaled scene. A fortified city, almost surrounded by ravines, and rising in the center of chains of far-spreading hills, occasionally offering, through their rocky glens, the gleams of a distant and richer land!

The moon has sunk behind the Mount of Olives, and the stars in the darker sky shine doubly bright over the sacred city. The all-prevailing stillness is broken by a breeze, that seems to have traveled over the plain of Sharon from the sea. It wails among the tombs, and sighs among the cypress groves. The palm-tree trembles as it passes, as if it were a spirit of wo. Is it the breeze that has traveled over the plain of Sharon from the sea?

Or is it the haunting voices of prophets mourning over the city that they could not save? Their spirits surely would linger on the land where their Creator had deigned to dwell, and over whose impending fate Omnipotence had shed human tears. From this Mount! Who can but believe that, at the midnight hour, from the summit of the Ascension, the great departed of Israel assembled to gaze upon the battlements of their mystic city! There might be counted heroes and sages, who need shrink from no rivalry with the brightest and the wisest of other lands; but the lawgiver of the time of the Pharaohs, whose laws are still obeyed; the monarch, whose reign has ceased for three thousand years, but whose wisdom is a proverb in all nations of the earth; the teacher, whose doctrines have modeled civilized Europe--the greatest of legislators, the greatest of administrators, and the greatest of reformers--what race, extinct or living, can produce three such men as these!

The last light is extinguished in the village of Bethany. The wailing breeze has become a moaning wind; a white film spreads over the purple sky; the stars are veiled, the stars are hid; all becomes as dark as the waters of Kedron and valley of Jehoshaphat. The tower of David merges into obscurity; no longer glitter the minarets of the mosque of Omar; Bethesda's angelic waters, the gate of Stephen, the street of sacred sorrow, the hill of Salem, and the heights of Scopas can no longer be discerned. Alone in the increasing darkness, while the very line of the walls gradually eludes the eye, the church of the Holy Sepulcher is a beacon-light.

And why is the church of the Holy Sepulcher a beacon-light? Why, when it is already past the noon of darkness, when every soul slumbers in Jerusalem, and not a sound disturbs the deep repose except the howl of the wild dog crying to the wilder wind--why is the cupola of the sanctuary illumined, tho the hour has long since been numbered, when pilgrims there kneel and monks pray?

An armed Turkish guard are bivouacked in the court of the church; within the church itself, two brethren of the convent of Terra Santa keep holy watch and ward; while, at the tomb beneath, there kneels a solitary youth, who prostrated himself at sunset, and who will there pass unmoved the whole of the sacred night.

Yet the pilgrim is not in communion with the Latin Church; neither is he of the Church Armenian, or the Church Greek; Maronite Coptic, or Abyssinian--these also are Christian churches which can not call him child.

He comes from a distant and a northern isle to bow before the tomb of a descendant of the kings of Israel, because he, in common with all the people of that isle, recognizes in that sublime Hebrew incarnation the presence of a divine Redeemer. Then why does he come alone? It is not that he has availed himself of the inventions of modern science, to repair first to a spot, which all his countrymen may equally desire to visit, and thus anticipate their hurrying arrival. Before the inventions of modern science, all his countrymen used to flock hither. Then why do they not now? Is the Holy Land no longer hallowed? Is it not the land of sacred and mysterious truths? The land of heavenly messages and earthly miracles? The land of prophets and apostles? Is it not the land upon whose mountains the Creator of the Universe parleyed with man, and the flesh of whose anointed race He mystically assumed, when He struck the last blow at the powers of evil? Is it to be believed that there are no peculiar and eternal qualities in a land thus visited, which distinguish it from all others--that Palestine is like Normandy or Yorkshire, or even Attica or Rome?

There may be some who maintain this; there have been some, and those, too, among the wisest and the wittiest of the northern and western races, who, touched by a presumptuous jealousy of the long predominance of that Oriental intellect to which they owed their civilization, would have persuaded themselves and the world that the traditions of Sinai and Calvary were fables. Half a century ago, Europe made a violent and apparently successful effort to disembarrass itself of its Asian faith. The most powerful and the most civilized of its kingdoms, about to conquer the rest, shut up its churches, desecrated its altars, massacred and persecuted their sacred servants, and announced that the Hebrew creeds which Simon Peter brought from Palestine, and which his successors revealed to Clovis, were a mockery and a fiction. What has been the result? In every city, town, village, and hamlet of that great kingdom, the divine image of the most illustrious of Hebrews has been again raised amid the homage of kneeling millions; while, in the heart of its bright and witty capital, the nation has erected the most gorgeous of modern temples, and consecrated its marble and golden walls to the name, and memory, and celestial efficacy of a Hebrew woman.

CHARLES MERIVALE

Born in 1808, died in 1893; educated at Cambridge; became rector of a parish in 1848; dean of Ely Cathedral in 1869; published his "History of the Romans Under the Empire" in 1850-62; "A General History of Rome" in 1875, "Contrast Between Christian and Pagan Society" in 1880.

THE PERSONALITY OF AUGUSTUS CÆSAR[13]

In stature Augustus hardly exceeded the middle height, but his person was lightly and delicately formed, and its proportions were such as to convey a favorable and even a striking impression. His countenance was pale, and testified to the weakness of his health, and almost constant bodily suffering; but the hardships of military service had imparted a swarthy tinge to a complexion naturally fair, and his eyebrows meeting over a sharp and aquiline nose gave a serious and stern expression to his countenance. His hair was light, and his eyes blue and piercing; he was well pleased if any one on approaching him looked on the ground and affected to be unable to meet their dazzling brightness. It was said that his dress concealed many imperfections and blemishes on his person; but he could not disguise all the infirmities under which he labored; the weakness of the forefinger of his right hand and a lameness in the left hip were the results of wounds he incurred in a battle with the Iapydæ in early life; he suffered repeated attacks of fever of the most serious kind, especially in the course of the campaign of Philippi and that against the Cantabrians, and again two years afterward at Rome, when his recovery was despaired of. From that time, altho constantly liable to be affected by cold and heat, and obliged to nurse himself throughout with the care of a valetudinarian, he does not appear to have had any return of illness so serious as the preceding; and dying at the age of seventy-four, the rumor obtained popular currency that he was prematurely cut off by poison administered by the empress.

[Footnote 13: From the "History of the Romans Under the Empire." Merivale's purpose in writing this book was to fill in the interval between the unfinished history by Thomas Arnold and Gibbon.]

As the natural consequence of this bodily weakness and sickly constitution, Octavian did not attempt to distinguish himself by active exertions or feats of personal prowess. The splendid examples of his uncle the dictator, and of Antonius[14] his rival, might have early discouraged him from attempting to shine as a warrior and hero; he had not the vivacity and animal spirits necessary to carry him through such exploits as theirs; and, altho he did not shrink from exposing himself to personal danger, he prudently declined to allow a comparison to to be instituted between himself and rivals whom he could not hope to equal. Thus necessarily thrown back upon other resources, he trusted to caution and circumspection, first to preserve his own life, and afterward to obtain the splendid prizes which had hitherto been carried off by daring adventure, and the good fortune which is so often its attendant. His contest therefore with Antonius and Sextus Pompeius was the contest of cunning with bravery; but from his youth upward he was accustomed to overreach, not the bold and reckless only, but the most considerate and wily of his contemporaries, such as Cicero and Cleopatra; he succeeded in the end in deluding the senate and people of Rome in the establishment of his tyranny; and finally deceived the expectations of the world, and falsified the lessons of the republican history, in reigning himself forty years in disguise, and leaving a throne to be claimed without challenge by his successors for fourteen centuries.

[Footnote 14: Mark Antony.]

But altho emperor in name, and in fact absolute master of his people, the manners of the Cæsar, both in public and private life, were still those of a simple citizen. On the most solemn occasions he was distinguished by no other dress than the robes and insignia of the offices which he exercised; he was attended by no other guards than those which his consular dignity rendered customary and decent. In his court there was none of the etiquette of modern monarchies to be recognized, and it was only by slow and gradual encroachment that it came to prevail in that of his successors. Augustus was contented to take up his residence in the house which had belonged to the orator Licinius Calvus, in the neighborhood of the Forum; which he afterward abandoned for that of Hortensius on the Palatine, of which Suetonius observes that it was remarkable neither for size nor splendor. Its halls were small, and lined, not with marble, after the luxurious fashion of many patrician palaces, but with the common Alban stone, and the pattern of the pavement was plain and simple. Nor when he succeeded Lepidus in the pontificate would he relinquish this private dwelling for the regia or public residence assigned that honorable office.

Many anecdotes are recorded of the moderation with which the emperor received the opposition, and often the rebukes, of individuals in public as well as in private. These stories are not without their importance, as showing how little formality there was in the tone of addressing the master of the Roman world, and how entirely different the ideas of the nation were, with regard to the position occupied by the Cæsar and his family from those with which modern associations have imbued us. We have already noticed the rude freedom with which Tiberius was attacked, altho step-son of the emperor, and participating in the eminent functions of the tribunitian power, by a declaimer in the schools at Rhodes: but Augustus himself seems to have suffered almost as much as any private citizen from the general coarseness of behavior which characterized the Romans in their public assemblies, and the rebukes to which he patiently submitted were frequently such as would lay the courtier of a constitutional sovereign in modern Europe under perpetual disgrace.

On one occasion, for instance, in the public discharge of his functions as corrector of manners, he had brought a specific charge against a certain knight for having squandered his patrimony. The accused proved that he had, on the contrary, augmented it. "Well," answered the emperor, somewhat annoyed by his error, "but you are at all events living in celibacy, contrary to recent enactments." The other was able to reply that he was married, and was the father of three legitimate children; and when the emperor signified that he had no further charges to bring, added aloud: "Another time, Cæsar, when you give ear to informations against honest men, take care that your informants are honest themselves." Augustus felt the justice of the rebuke thus publicly administered, and submitted to it in silence.

ALEXANDER W. KINGLAKE

Born in 1809, died in 1891; traveled in the East and published "Eothen; or Traces of Travel Brought Home from the East," in 1844; visited Algiers in 1845; went with the British army to the Crimea in 1854, remaining until the siege of Sebastopol; a member of Parliament in 1857-68; published his "Invasion of the Crimea" in 1863-87.

I

ON MOCKING AT THE SPHINX[15]

And near the Pyramids, more wondrous and more awful than all else in the land of Egypt, there sits the lonely Sphinx. Comely the creature is, but the comeliness is not of this world; the once worshiped beast is a deformity and a monster to this generation, and yet you can see that those lips, so thick and heavy, were fashioned according to some ancient mold of beauty--some mold of beauty now forgotten--forgotten because that Greece drew forth Cytherea from the flashing foam of the Ægean, and in her image created new forms of beauty, and made it a law among men that the short and proudly wreathed lip should stand for the sign and the main condition of loveliness through all generations to come. Yet still there lives on the race of those who were beautiful in the fashion of the elder world, and Christian girls of Coptic blood will look on you with the sad, serious gaze, and kiss your charitable hand with the big pouting lips of the very Sphinx.

[Footnote 15: From "Eothen," which long since took its place as a classic among books of travel.]

Laugh and mock if you will at the worship of stone idols; but mark ye this, ye breakers of images, that in one regard the stone idol bears awful semblance of Deity--unchangefulness in the midst of changes--the same seeming will and intent for ever and ever inexorable! Upon ancient dynasties of Ethiopian and Egyptian kings--upon Greek and Roman, upon Arab and Ottoman conquerors--upon Napoleon dreaming of an Eastern empire--upon battle and pestilence--upon the ceaseless misery of the Egyptian race--upon keen-eyed travelers--Herodotus yesterday, and Warburton to-day--upon all and more this unworldly Sphinx has watched, and watched like a Providence with the same earnest eyes, and the same sad, tranquil mien. And we, we shall die, and Islam will wither away, and the Englishman straining far over to hold his loved India, will plant a firm foot on the banks of the Nile, and sit in the seats of the Faithful, and still that sleepless rock will lie watching and watching the works of the new busy race, with those same sad earnest eyes, and the same tranquil mien everlasting. You dare not mock at the Sphinx!

II

THE BEGINNING OF THE CRIMEAN WAR[16]

Looking back upon the troubles which ended in the outbreak of war, one sees the nations at first swaying backward and forward like a throng so vast as to be helpless, but afterward falling slowly into warlike array. And when one begins to search for the man or the men whose volition was governing the crowd, the eye falls upon the towering form of the Emperor Nicholas. He was not single-minded, and therefore his will was unstable, but it had a huge force; and, since he was armed with the whole authority of his empire, it seemed plain that it was this man--and only he--who was bringing danger from the north. And at first, too, it seemed that within his range of action there was none who could be his equal: but in a little while the looks of men were turned to the Bosporus, for thither his ancient adversary was slowly bending his way.

[Footnote 16: From "The Invasion of the Crimea," one of the masterpieces of modern historical literature, but often criticized for its excessive bias against France as represented by Napoleon III.]

To fit him for the encounter, the Englishman was clothed with little authority except what he could draw from the resources of his own mind and from the strength of his own wilful nature. Yet it was presently seen that those who were near him fell under his dominion, and did as he bid them, and that the circle of deference to his will was always increasing around him; and soon it appeared that, tho he moved gently, he began to have mastery over a foe who was consuming his strength in mere anger. When he had conquered, he stood, as it were, with folded arms, and seemed willing to desist from strife. But also in the west there had been seen a knot of men possest for the time of the mighty engine of the French State, and striving so to use it as to be able to keep their hold, and to shelter themselves from a cruel fate. The volitions of these men were active enough, because they were toiling for their lives. Their efforts seemed to interest and to please the lustiest man of those days, for he watched them from over the Channel with approving smile, and began to declare, in his good-humored, boisterous way, that so long as they should be suffered to have the handling of France, _so long as they would execute for him his policy_, so long as they would take care not to deceive him, they ought to be encouraged, they ought to be made use of, they ought to have the shelter they wanted; and, the Frenchmen agreeing to his conditions, he was willing to level the barrier--he called it perhaps false pride--which divided the government of the Queen from the venturers of the 2d of December. In this thought, at the moment, he stood almost alone; but he abided his time. At length he saw the spring of 1853, bringing with it grave peril to the Ottoman State. Then, throwing aside with a laugh some papers which belonged to the Home Office, he gave his strong shoulder to the leveling work. Under the weight of his touch the barrier fell. Thenceforth the hindrances that met him were but slight. As he from the first had willed it, so moved the two great nations of the West.

CHARLES DARWIN

Born in 1809, died in 1882; grandson of Erasmus Darwin; educated at Edinburgh and Cambridge; went around the world on a scientific expedition in 1831-36; settled in Kent in 1842 and thenceforth devoted his life to scientific research; published "The Origin of Species" in 1859, "The Descent of Man" in 1871, "The Emotions of Man and Animals" in 1872.

I

ON VARIATIONS IN MAMMALS, BIRDS AND FISHES[17]