Alas! what is the description of persons we dignify by the name of Great? For my own part, my Lelius, I have never insulted the virtues of William Penn, by admiring Alexander or Borgia; nor did I ever drop a tear of regret upon the tomb of the most celebrated warrior in Westminster Abbey. Those men, whom the generality of mankind call HEROES; and who have so often stained the hearths and the thresholds of palaces and cottages with native blood, fret a dangerous hour upon the public stage: thousands shout to them applauses; while the truly great, good, and illustrious, hide their faces with their robes, and wait a surer and a nobler recompense, than the honour or applause of man, in a distant, but in a far more comprehensive portion of the universe than this. Since we are upon the imposing subject of greatness, let us call to our recollection the names of a few of those men, whom the writers of history designate GREAT. Doubtless they were the fathers of their country; and it will give you pleasure to reflect on the memory of so many excellent men: for greatness, of course, has reference to goodness; since the one and the other are the distinguishing characteristics of the ETERNAL himself. And it is not, for one moment, to be supposed, that historians have been guilty of such impiety to the Deity, or have been such traitors to the general welfare of mankind, as to call those great, who were only worthy of a public scaffold! Every good man is not a great one, it is true; but every great one must, of necessity, be a good one: and yet, who are the wretches, whom historians exalt to the admiration of the world? Who are they, but Alexander and Antiochus and Mahomet and Frederick and Peter and Catherine and Charles XII. and Tamerlane, and a host of monsters, equally base and equally detestable? Shades of the immortal Phocion, Alfred, Piastus, and Stanislaus; in what ignominious society are your honoured memories associated! Thesethese, my friend, were men, who would have dignified the lowest condition of life; and whose names form, of themselves, the noblest epitaphs for royal sepulchres. As to Frederick! -the following lines, written by that blood-stained monarch, prove too truly, that some kings are no more to be known by their poems, than they are by their proclamations. See the world's victor mounts his car; To fight, to conquer, and to die. And doom'd the hungry reptile's meal? Yes! Fortune, wearied with her play, And scarce the form of man is seen. The cypress mine, funereal green! So much for the "serpent's tongue and crocodile's tears" of this detested man; whose mother, like what is fabled of the pelican, seems to have fed him from her veins, instead of her bosom. How different from the character of Simon, king of Judea! While Syria was desolated by wars, the Jews, in the reign of Simon, lived in ease and tranquillity: every man enjoyed the fruit of his labours; and every man, sitting under his own figtree, augmented his private felicity, by dwelling on the flourishing state of his country. As to the science of government, it is like that of geology,—still in its infancy! For the utmost, that governors have hitherto done for the major part of mankind, has been to "form men for governments, rather than governments for men ;" and being both priestly and military, the art of legis a Maccabees. lation, if it ever revive again, must rise out of the ruin of lawyers, petty magistrates, and time-serving representatives. Unlimited power is the mental pestilence of many men's idolatry. It is one of the scrophulas of the human mind. In the place of that deep, sagacious, and combining mind, so necessary to constitute a great statesman, theirs prompts them to draw outlines of conquests, which at length finish in the acquirement of an empire in which to build the sepulchre of liberty. Such was the ambition of Rome in the time of the Cæsars. "When the enemy is rich," said Galgacus to the Caledonians, "the prize for which the Romans fight, is wealth-when poor, it is ambition. Neither the east, nor the west, is sufficient for them. They covet the poverty, as well as the wealth of the world; and with equal appetite. Murder and pillage they dignify with the name of government; and where they have made a solitude, they proclaim to the world, they have established peace." These very Romans, however, met the fate, they had, for so many ages, entailed upon the rest of the world. They were not like the Psylli of antiquity, who, presuming to make war upon the wind, because it had dried up their fountains, were overwhelmed in the sands, and perished; but they perished at home leaving the glory of their republican forefathers to cover the ignominy arising out of their vices and crimes. : And yet, perhaps, the cruelty of a conqueror is less to be admired, than his impertinence! Tamerlane, one of the greatest robbers the world ever saw, presumed to punish the smallest theft, that was committed in his own camp. Charles the Twelfth, too, practised the same rigour. A peasant one day having thrown himself at his feet, and complained of having been robbed by a grenadier; the king ordered the soldier into his presence. “And have you, indeed, robbed this poor man of a dinner, which he had provided for himself and his family?" sternly inquired the king. "I have," answered the soldier. "But in doing so, I have not treated him so badly, as your majesty has treated Augustus: for while I have robbed this man only of a dinner, you have robbed Augustus of a whole kingdom!" Charles the Twelfth, Frederic of Prussia, Napoleon, and indeed all other warriors, seem to act upon the principle, lately allowed, of wager of battle. It were the most difficult of all difficult conquests to charm such monsters into men! And what do they get by their tyranny, their rapine, and their extravagance? Read the letter of Phalaris, one of the worst tyrants that Sicily, the nurse of tyrants, ever groaned under. "After no small pains to obtain a knowledge of mankind, I am of opinion, that the Lybian deserts, or the wild dens of Numidia, are infinitely preferable to a habitation And I account it more safe to sleep among among men. lions, and to crawl with the reptiles of the earth, than to live with them b" What a noble and dignified employment it would be to live in the exercise of a power, and a will, to administer to the comforts of an honourable people! To drop manna in their fields; to awaken a sense of charity and felicity, by uniting profound policy to genius; and thereby shedding the sunshine of glory over a useful life. Happy,-pre-eminently happy,-shall we account ourselves, when there shall arise among the nations a prince, formed in the schools of Plato and Fenelon; who shall say to his family, his friends, his Trial by wager of battle was common among the ancient Germans *, the Burgundi +, and the Swedes . William of Normandy introduced it into England: it was practised in the reign of Elizabeth §, and the law allowing its efficacy is still unrepealed. Our legislators, therefore, still countenance the plea of its first adoption;-viz. that Heaven will at all times protect the righteous, and give victory to him to whom victory is due; and that, too, in direct opposition to the Christian acknowledgment, that the race is not always to the swift, nor the victory to the strong. Phal. Epist. xxxiv. *Paterculus, Hist. lib. ii. c. 118. Stiernh. de Jure Sueno. i. c. 7., + Selden. § 1631-1638. Comment. b. iii. ch. 22.-Dante allows its efficacy.-De Monarchia, p. 51. subjects, and the world," Hitherto ye have felt little of the comforts of life! Your years have been full of trouble; your youth was wasted in suffering; your manhood in contentions; but your age shall be spent in repose. The worst passions of the human heart have been too long in conspiracy against the nobler ones: you shall now have not only respite, but tranquillity. Feed your flocks and prune your vines: the corn you sow, no one but yourselves shall reap: give yourselves up, therefore, to the milder and far more manly occupations of life; since I am a king, that idolize true glory; and, therefore, love peace better than war." In the relative estimate of ability mere warriors are mere emmets. In an army of twenty thousand, not less than two thousand would make good generals, if they had the opportunity. But, as to pre-eminent statesmen! There is not one born in five centuries. "The world is undone," says Sir Wm. Temple, "by looking at things at a distance." The virtues of statesmen are courage, disinterestedness, humanity, justice, magnanimity, and a love of their country. Warriors! Let them die, and let them be forgotten. Holding up the head of Medusa, as it were, before the gaze of prostrate nations, they are unknown in the great volume of wisdom. Nature recognizes them, as she does the serpent and the alligator. They are discords in this world of harmony; and, converting a land of honey into a land of tears, they are deformities in this universe of beauty. We will shed no tear in honour of their memories; nor will we plant one rose, jessamine, or ivy, over their monuments. History, as it is usually written, is, after all that can be said in its favour, a most disgusting tale for human patience! A mere recital of the origin of wars; their calamities; their progress; their boyish beginnings, and boyish terminations. When a Persian minister was advising his monarch not to wage war for the sake of a province, which would never be of any service to him, the king replied, "It certainly is of no |