VI. Che First Death. "Javan!" said Enoch, "on this spot began Was murder, and that murder fratricide!" MONTGOMERY. FROM the author of death came the temptation, and man was already so much in the bondage of that mysterious corruption which had followed the great transgression, that the temptation was heard, and actual death. was first introduced in demoniac hatred. The impulse of hatred, which is only just when it is turned against some entirely and irrecoverably evil being, is, to work a partial or a total destruction. Life is the utmost which it is in the power of man to destroy. Beasts had been struck down, and had ceased to exist, before the eyes of Cain: his hatred moved him to wish that Abel might thus be destroyed: his arm dealt the blow; and his brother, like one of the lambs of his own flock, sank in his blood, and breathed his life away. The murderer was smitten with desperate horror: he knew, by an inward instinct, that all men would hold it just to slay him: but the death by violence, the murder, the fratricide which he had wrought, could never be retraced, but was to be the dreadful type of many future horrors. For wealth and rule, Abimelech, the son of Gideon, poured out on one stone the lives of his seventy brothers, and gained the horrible distinction of the most enormous murder in human history. In revenge for a most unnatural wrong, Absalom commanded his servants to slay his brother Amnon, when his heart was merry with wine. Many a sovereign, especially in the East, has not shrunk from securing his throne by the sacrifice of fraternal blood, and this has passed into a proverb, amongst the Ottomans. Cambyses, king of Persia, ordered the execution of his brother Smerdis, and with his own brutal foot inflicted a fatal blow on his sister Meroe. Seven fratricides occurred in the line of Darius Hystaspes; and three at least amongst the Ptolemies. Mithridates began his reign with the slaughter of his mother and brother. Tryphena, the wife of Antiochus Grypus, caused her sister Cleopatra to be slain in a temple, clasping the image to which she had fled for refuge. Onias, the Jewish high-priest, after being supplanted by one brother, was slain by command of another. In the house of Hyrcanus, the Asmonean prince of Judea, Aristobulus slew Antigonus his brother, by the hands of his guards; and Alexander Janneus, a third brother, caused a fourth to be put to death. Geta was butchered in the arms of his mother, in the presence, and by the order of his brother Caracalla. The ambition of Richard the Third prepared his way to the throne by the death of his brother, George, Duke of Clarence, and of his royal nephews. In humbler spheres, brothers have been waylaid by brothers for their estates, or struck down in wrath or revenge. It has been dreadful, too, even though the guilt of murder were not incurred, when one of princely rank, dying for treason, has been put to death with the direct consent of one who had been cradled in the same arins. Thus, Adonijah died by the sentence of Solomon; and the name of the Protector Somerset was the first signature to the warrant for the execution of his brother, Thomas, Lord Seymour. Less often, perhaps, has a parent thus inflicted death upon a child; except when some Brutus, or Torquatus, or Manlius, has nerved himself with the old Roman ferocity of justice. A Spartan woman is related to have killed her son for returning safe from a battle, where his companions fell. It is said that one of the Medici slew, with his own arm, one of his two sons, who had slain the other on a hunting excursion. Herod the Great put to death the uncle of his much-beloved wife Mariamne; then, her grandfather Hyrcanus; then, in a fury of jealousy, Mariamne herself; then, his own sons by her; and at last, his son Antipater. But children have imbrued their hands in the blood of parents, even though the conscience of Pagans once clothed the punishment of parricide with peculiar horrors. The proud Sennacherib was murdered by his sons, Adrammelech and Sharezer, while he worshipped in the temple of his god Nisroch. Cleopatra, the mother of Antiochus Grypus, prepared poison for him, which he compelled her to drink. Bajazet the Second was poisoned by his son Selim. Through a signal triumph of the tempter, aged parents have been left by their children, in savage nations, to die by hunger or by wild beasts; and little children have been exposed to death by their parents; and the act has been followed by no remorse, and perhaps has been deemed religious. The king of Moab, in the contest with Israel, offered up his son for a burnt-offering; and if the daughter of Jephthah was really sacrificed, her father had borrowed the dreadful thought from the heathen. Manasseh and the idolatrous Jews caused their own sons to pass through the fire to Moloch; which, if not a direct immolation, must often, no doubt, have been fatal. The ancient Arabs buried female children alive. An African tribe buried all their infants, and adopted the children of their captives. The Panches of Bogota destroyed all girls who were the first-born of their parents. In China, such multitudes of female infants perish, that the annual number exposed in the streets of Pekin by night is estimated at four thousand, all of whom, with the morning light, are thrown, living or dead, into the grave. Along the Ganges, till the British rule forbade, the mother very often, cast her offspring, to the goddess of the river. In New Holland and the Polynesian islands, a large proportion of each generation; in the Society Islands, before the introduction of Christianity, so large a proportion as three-fourths, have perished by the parental hand or direction. The child of the American Indian was not murdered, unless in some moment of impatience. Ties of remoter kindred have been severed by the sword with still less of remorse. Joab, with ferocious vengeance or envious treachery, slew his two kinsmen, Absalom and Amasa, as well as Abner, with his own hand. Athaliah destroyed all the seed royal of Judah. The death of Prince Arthur of Brittany was ascribed to his uncle, King John; that of Richard the Second to his cousin who dethroned him; and that of Henry the Sixth to his victorious kinsmen and supplanters. The Italian chronicles, as well as the histories of the East, are red with these tales of unnatural murder. As with Herod and with Henry the Eighth, the appetite for blood has found peculiar and horrid satisfaction in the slaughter of defenceless women. A brutal jealousy consigned the wretched sultana to the Bosphorus, and lifts the club of the coarse village drunkard against the wife who has borne with his enormities. Nero killed his wife Octavia, as well as his mother Agrippina. Amalasuntha, queen of the Ostrogoths, was strangled in the bath by the order of a husband whom she had elevated. Gonzaga, prince of Mantua, ordered the execution of the princess, his spouse; and a prince of the house of Caraffa slew his wife from jealousy. The infuriated demon often strikes in his frenzy at the nearest object; and thus it is that, of all murders, that of a wife or of one who has been admitted to the place of a wife, is probably the most frequent, as well as the most shocking. Less often has the guilt of the murderess been found in the bosom of the wife. But Alboin, king of the Lombards, was a victim to the revenge of Rosamond, his queen, for the death of her father; Edward the Second was murdered through the instigation of his "she-wolf" wife; Catharine the Second mounted the throne over the corpse of her husband; and Mary of Scotland at least wedded the murderer of Henry Darnley. In common life, the assassin of the husband has sometimes been the paramour of the wife; and there have been instances in our times when a strange thirst for destruction has been infused by the devil, and women have administered poison to one after another whom they had first allured to the nuptial bed. But as murder is the terrible exception from common death, so these are the terrible exceptions from common murder. They have been the utmost advances of sin and death and of their infernal author. Except where infanticide or human sacrifice has been a custom, and except the unlawful offspring destroyed as soon as born, |