Charles the Tenth, was killed in the heart of Paris. An infernal machine, discharged from a window as Louis Philippe rode by with his train, destroyed instantly the Duke of Treviso, and other officers. Of all assassinations, that one which the mind recalls with least pain, was when the monster Marat, in his bath, was struck to the heart, by the knife of Charlotte Corday; and one of the saddest was when a frenzied wretch, on the steps of Westminster Hall, shot down the excellent minister Perceval.

The name assassin is derived from a tribe who inhabited Mount Lebanon and some other regions of the East, in the days of the Crusades, and obeyed a chief who sent his emissaries wherever he would, against his enemies, without the possibility of defence. By the stroke of one of them died Louis of Bavaria; and Conrad, Marquis of Montferrat, was murdered by one, in the very street of Sidon. But the most amazing and horrid of all systems of murder, exceeding the combined operations of all the bandits of all ages, has been the long concealed union of the Thugs of Hindostan ; whose life, whose delight, whose glory, and whose worship consisted in the secret, remorseless destruction of defenceless travellers by strangling. Their antiquity was unknown; their cruelty was uniform; and many thousands must have been their victims. The glimpses of savage history which can be won, disclose innumerable murders in wild lands; the proofs of an almost inconceivable amount of bloodshed which has cried from the ground, in spots whose history has never been told. Amongst nations not simply barbarous, the avenger of blood has, from the beginning, assumed the task of executing the doom ordained for the murderer; and bloody feuds have passed from

fathers to sons, and from families to tribes. Spain, Italy, and the East, have been the chief scenes of those private assassinations, which, in a more advanced condition of society, have been prompted by revenge, pride, or the love of gold. In Spain, in the year 1826, twelve hundred and thirty-three persons were convicted of murders. Death by murder is, in Northern and Christian lands, the rare work of a peculiar atrocity of mind. Still, our own age has seen the ruffian, plunging his blade into the breasts of a whole family; the youth stabbing the old. man in his midnight sleep; the mistress, torturing her servant till death was the release; the poisoner, gaining a kind of fiendish delight in her trade, till her victims were a numerous company; and the loathsome monsters, who, for the price of a dead body in the schools of anatomy, smothered their unhappy associates. If, in the most favoured regions of the earth, all those be numbered who die by wilful, private violence, they are probably more than one in a hundred thousand; a proportion which would yield from the present population of the globe the number of ten thousand. But when the condition of all the earth is weighed, we shall deem a tenfold estimate small; and the murdered of all times may be millions.

VIII.

Death by Massacre.

"Tumultuous murder shook the midnight air."

CAMPBELL

THE terrible sight of a multitude of human beings slain without armed resistance has been sometimes witnessed by indignant angels. This is not the indiscriminate slaughter of ancient war, when the whole population that could not flee was often destroyed; nor the relentless bloodshed, which in later times may have followed a hard victory; but it is that deliberate extirpation, that vast execution, which, if it cannot be justified as punishment, is massacre.

When all the Canaanites who withdrew not from the armies of Israel, were slain, it was by the express command of the Creator of all; and it was for their dreadful and unnatural iniquities. When Elijah slew hundreds of prophets of Baal, it was an execution of the national and the divine law, and was sanctioned by stupendous miracles. Seventy sons of Ahab were put to death by Jehu; but he had a commission from heaven. When, however, he gathered a company of the worshippers of Baal within a temple at Samaria, and slaughtered them there, his commission from above certainly comprehended not his bloody treachery. The Spartans perfidiously massacred two thousand Helots, who had served bravely in the wars of Sparta, and were therefore feared as slaves. Fourteen hundred Athenians were butchered

on one spot by the Thirty Tyrants. On a tumult amongst the Jews at the passover, Archelaus sent out his troops, and slew three thousand around the temple. Before the last Jewish war began, the Syrians in differ. ent cities arose and massacred of the doomed nation, in Cæsarea twenty thousand, in Scythopolis thirteen thousand, in Askelon two thousand and five hundred, in Ptolemais two thousand, while, if indeed the large numbers of Josephus be not habitual exaggerations, fifty thousand of the slain were heaped up at Alexandria. The slaughter of the Jews by Vespasian and Titus was the result of an obstinate war and an indomitable resistance. Five days and nights the soldiers of Marius murdered at pleasure throughout the streets of Rome; but the speedy retribution of his rival Sylla was yet more terrific. Sylla assembled seven thousand of the opposite faction, and caused them to be put to the sword, in the circus; while, within the sound of their cries, he completed his stern harangue to the senators. Then, he prepared his list of proscription; and five thousand more fell by the stroke of any blade that would strike an outlaw. From a secure place at Alexandria, Caracalla directed the massacre of many thousands of strangers and citizens. Offended by the mutinous fury of the populace of Thessalonica, the Emperor Theodosius the Great, admirable as he was, adopted a fatal resolve. The message sped; the retraction was too late; and without discrimination of age, sex, or character, seven thousand persons, assembled in the circus, were slain with promiscuous butchery. Well might Ambrose repulse the bloodstained sovereign from the altar of the Prince of Peace, till he had proved his bitter penitence, and enacted a law which made such haste to shed blood impossible. The Caliph Abdallah,

after the treaty with the Ommiades princes, assembled them, to the number of eighty, slew them with clubs, spread a carpet over their bodies, and made a banquet on the spot. The Sicilian Vespers, on the eve of Easter-day, in 1282, were a tumultuous onset of the maddened natives of the island upon the French under Charles of Anjou; and the Italian rage was not appeased till the seven thousand Frenchmen who were in Sicily lay in their blood. The Burgundian faction in Paris, under the reign of Charles the Sixth, surrounded the Chatelet, called forth the two thousand Armagnac prisoners, one by one, and beheaded them as they issued from the door. After more than three centuries, the same scene was repeated in the same city, when the murderers stood at the door of each prison; eight thousand men and women were struck down with pikes and swords; hundreds of priests perished; and the head of the beautiful Princess de Lamballe, its tresses draggled in gore, was lifted on a pike to the window of the imprisoned Louis. In the massacre of St. Bartholomew, and the subsequent slaughter throughout many cities of France, fifty thousand Protestants are said to have been slain in cold blood; the foremost of all, the good Coligny. England has scarcely witnessed a massacre: the slaughter of Glencoe extended to less than forty. But in France, during the Revolution, an almost undistinguishing cruelty was often let loose: seven hundred priests were butchered at Nantes: hundreds of victims were placed in rows at Lyons, and cannonaded: hundreds were drowned in the Loire; and many thousands were shot after the suppression of the Vendean insurrection. Slavers have thrown overboard whole scores of sickly negroes; but in the Haytian revolt a nation of untaught