harmless, nowise terrible. Now we realize it; we see in it the shell as it bursts asunder; the compact and single word scatters into a thousand instances of anguish and of death. We learn to estimate details; we imagine the processes of cruelty when we hear of its results; we reckon up the items that swell the dreadful total.

What wonder, then, that some of the most tragic passages in history should seem most in keeping with our present mood of mind? Prosperous scenes and periods, with their pastoral uplands, busy marts, and festival pageants, have grown unreal and remote. They are parts of the historic panorama that have receded now from the focus of our vision; while the darker features, and those most similar to our present calamities, are projected towards us, magnified in form and heightened in colour. The annals of massacre present us with much that resembles, with nothing that surpasses, this Indian outbreak. Other massacres, greater in extent, have been less painful in some of their circumstances; or where scarcely less atrocious in their treachery, less formidable in significance, and less widely-spread in compass.

Imagine—and it is not now difficult—the horrors of that day in Rome, when some swift courier from the last homeward trireme, just landed at Brundusium, brought word that secret orders from Mithridates had commanded on a certain day the slaughter of every Roman and every Italian throughout Asia Minor, that the secret had been kept, the massacre perpetrated, without distinction of sex or age, the bodies thrown out to the vultures and the dogs,—that not less, it might be supposed, than a hundred and fifty thousand souls had fallen victims to this master-stroke of Asiatic cruelty and craft! Think how the senators, sad and stern, would take counsel, feeling that the name of Roman in the East had sustained a terrible shock, that must be terribly avenged! The equestrian order and the moneyed men see ruin close at hand; all that thronging populace would fain arm and sail on the instant; a muttered vow of vengeance is on every lip. Women go home to weep, stricken with the sense of widowhood as by a pestilence. A mighty power

had that Pontic king, a worthy foe for all the strength of Rome,— the last representative of the great Macedonian empire, so strong in undying hatred of the Roman name, in stores of treasure, in alliances and fleets and armies, in exhaustless fertility of resource. But his fall was sure, though long delayed. On the ruins of his greatness Rome founded larger empire in that golden East, and extorted wealth that more than recompensed her losses. She reached the height of her power after a disaster which seemed to shake its very foundation. The close of the Mithridatic war was the culminating point of her real greatness. The AngloSaxon will not accomplish less than the Roman, for his destinies are higher. The situation of Rome was in one respect more difficult than ours, for she found all the resources of the East combined and arrayed against her by a single mind of indomitable energy. Our Indian adversaries lack a head, and act with little concert; for the King of Delhi is but a name about which revolt may rally, and Nena Sahib is only a partisan leader, not the centre of control. On the other hand, the Romans were not betrayed and assailed by Asiatics furnished with Roman arms and trained to Roman discipline. The superiority of the West is already not less decisive on the part of Britain than of Rome. All that the legionaries of Lucullus and of Pompey were to the turbaned hosts of Mithridates, that, and even more, have been the Highlanders of Havelock to the mutineers under Nena Sahib.

Some conspiracies, which, if successful, would have changed the face of history, have failed upon the very brink of action. They resemble those coral structures which rise (the work of innumerable insects) from the secret depths of the ocean, but stop at the surface; for the architects perish as soon as they emerge into the air. Such was the conspiracy of the Pazzi, in Florence, to exterminate the family of Medici; and such that remarkable plot of one Cinadon for the massacre of the Spartans. Xenophon relates the contrivance by which the ephors succeeded in suppressing this dangerous conspiracy of men who were ready to eat them raw,' and in

suppress

ing it with such speed and secrecy that the capital knew of the crime only by the spectacle of punishment. Verily, never was government so clad as that of Sparta in cap of darkness and shoes of swiftness. The Venetian oligarchy was not more awful in mystery; the emissaries of the Secret Tribunal not more stealthy and inevitable; the Assassins from the Old Man of the Mountain less ubiquitous. The other day, Sir John Lawrence detected and punished a nascent plot still more secretly and swiftly; but Sir John Lawrence had at his command the electric telegraph.

Two successful massacres stand prominent in history, both perpetrated by a vanquished nation on an invading enemy,-the massacre of the Danes in our own island, and that slaughter of the French conquerors of Sicily known by the name of the Sicilian Vespers. Of these, the latter eventually emancipated the people from an intolerable yoke; the former only aggravated their sufferings, was as short-sighted as it was cruel.

The sluggard King Ethelred buys a third respite with a ruinous tribute, and then sends secret letters out, ordering a general massacre for the ninth of July. Our Anglo-Saxon forefathers were secret and pitiless. The stroke fell most heavily on the Danes who had settled down peaceably among them, not on the new-comers about the coasts, who had just committed fresh depredations, and were eager for more. Gunhildis, the sister of Sweyn, was not spared, though she and the earl her husband had embraced Christianity. She saw her husband and her young son butchered before her face, and was then beheaded, foretelling (as it came to pass) that her death would cost England dear. The murderers had been stung to the most indiscriminate fury by every atrocity of barbarous outrage. But we read of no elaborate ingenuities of torture.

The Sicilians that nation of husbandmen and shepherds-were goaded to their deed of blood by a rapacity of taxation surpassed scarcely anywhere in history. Only the petulant presumption of a Charles of Anjou could have supposed that human beings would endure it tamely. Yet in more than one place the Sicilians had

spared the lives of their tormentors and suffered them to depart unharmed. Charles of Anjou had to witness, with gestures of impotent rage, the burning of that fleet which was to have conquered Constantinople; and Sicily was lost to France.

We have not driven a nation to madness by a taxation that has made every man's life a burden. We have never by barbarous ravage provoked the reprisals of treachery and torture. The hatred which rages against us in the heart of the Hindoo is the rage of a creature credulous as a child. It is not for what we have done, but for what the Mohammedan has persuaded him we were going to do, that he is now so athirst for the blood of every 'Feringhee.' It is not the people of Hindostan who have risen against us. Whatever may have been our faults, it cannot be denied that we have protected and benefited that people while we have taxed them. It is the sepoy army only that has dreamt of our extermination,-the men whom we have humoured till they detected our weakness and felt their own strength. The opportunity we have afforded them will be a marvel to all time. This is a fact unparalleled in history,—that a nation should annex province after province and expect to hold them in security almost solely by means of troops taken from the subject provincials themselves. Our traditional policy has been a singular mixture of concession and contempt. When we conceded so much as we did to their prejudices, we should have abated a little of our contempt for their powers.

No

small expectation was awakened when it was announced that

the author of Vanity Fair was about to appear before us in a new walk of fiction. The period selected was one of great and varied interest. He had already portrayed with skill its literary characteristics, in a course of lectures recently delivered. It remained to be seen how far the art which had depicted so successfully times present, or very near our own, would add to its triumphs among scenes and characters more remote. The new work could neither be assisted nor injured by the fragmentary method of monthly publication. It would be written, as it would be read, at once. It would probably be carefully matured and harmonized throughout— 'teres atque rotundus.'

Taken as a whole, Esmond will not disappoint those who are best able to appreciate the real excellence of this popular author. The devourer of novels, greedy for mere excitement, will pronounce the book heavy. The action is, indeed, in some parts much too tardy. The preface, and the introductory part of the story, though well written, introduce the characters awkwardly. The reader wishes for a genealogical tree of this confusing Castlewood family, and only begins fairly to enjoy that part of the book on a second reading. An author should endeavour to interest his readers as early as pos