slaves took dreadful vengeance for the oppression of their race; and thirty thousand whites were slaughtered, many in their own halls and gardens. On the sandhills near Jaffa, Buonaparte shot a small army of Turkish prisoners, whom he could not feed, and dared not release. When Mohammed Ali of Egypt wished to shake off the troublesome Mamelukes, who had been so terrible, he looked on while five or six hundred, pent within a large court, were laid in their blood, one only leaping his horse over the barrier. The slaughter at Scio aroused the sympathies of all Christendom. But no bloodshed related in history was like that where the Sultan Mahmoud destroyed the whole army of his janizaries, whose strength threatened his throne. Thirty thousand were inclosed within walls, in one dense mass, through which his cannon ploughed, till all was over. Yet Timour built pyramids, of seventy thousand skulls at Ispahan, and ninety thousand at Bagdad.

Asia and Africa could furnish many of these awful tales of cruelty. So have hundreds of thousands died; and each death had all from which man shrinks in agony. When a single person like Hypatia, or Vitale Michieli, doge of Venice, or James Van Artevelde, or Delaunay, or Dewitt, or Marshal Brune, or Basseville, or like so many in the earlier days of the French Revolution, has been torn in pieces by the crowd, or hurried to the lantern, we seem to feel all which is possible. The mind is stupified by the horrors of those scenes, in which one such death has been many thousand times multiplied.

5

Death in Single Combat.

"For double murder armed, his own, and his
That as himself he was ordained to love."

POLLOK.

MEN have fallen in single combat with their fellowmen, in a manner which has partaken of the several characteristics of war, murder, and suicide. It has been like war, because there was mutual hostility; it has been like murder, so often at least as it was in private quarrels, and in violation of the laws; and it has been like suicide, because the exposure to death was voluntary and needless.

At first, all single fights could have been no more than parts of more general war, or else attempts to murder which were met by armed resistance. These were afterwards imitated in games; and then at length the imitation itself, for more intense excitement, grew into a bloody contest. Through six centuries, gladiatorial combats were held at Rome and other great cities of the Roman dominion. Julius Cæsar, when he was ædile, exhibited more than six hundred combatants; and on a single occasion, Trajan brought out ten thousand. All were compelled to fight to the last; and if one was borne to the ground, and quite overcome without a mortal wound, his life depended upon the caprice of the people or emperor, to whom the victor looked for the sign to

spare or to slay. Christianity by degrees abolished a diversion worthy of demons; but an Asiatic monk, Telemachus, was first the martyr of humanity. He threw himself between the gladiators, and was overwhelmed beneath a shower of stones. The Emperor Honorius then decreed that these sports should exist no more; and as the decree was not always observed, they were finally suppressed by Theodoric.

The idea of combats for the decision of individual guilt or innocence, honour or dishonour, is of later origin. It sprang up in the dark ages, amongst nations trained to arms, addicted to superstition, standing between the ancient and the modern civilization, and too little able to appeal from violence to independent tribunals of justice; and it was connected, too, with the half sportive and half earnest exercises in the lists which were the amusement of such nations. The trial by combat was an appeal to the God of battles. Both the accuser and the accused, or his champion, were supposed to offer themselves, as if to the immediate realization of their oath ;

"And as I truly fight, defend me Heaven!"

But the test was unauthorized; and the slaughter may have been indiscriminating. Such trials and such deaths, however, were probably rather noticed for their interest. than for their frequency.

Sometimes, in the less serious encounters of the tournament, one of the champions might receive a fatal fall or blow; as Henry the Second of France was mortally wounded by the lance of Montgomeri, which pierced his eye. Sometimes, in the rude struggle of boxers, an

unfortunate man, fighting with blind desperation, has been beaten till life itself gave way. But these were accidents: the sports, however perilous or barbarous, were not designed to destroy.

The modern duel has been the offspring, on one side, of the trial by arms; on the other, of the brutal yet playful contests of chivalry. A revenge only satisfied with blood has often armed the challenger. In a public duel, the celebrated Chevalier Bayard slew a Spaniard, piercing his throat with his sword, and, when they were down, driving his dagger into his eye and brain. The most recent times, permitting duels, if at all, only to prove the honour by proving the courage of both antagonists, have made them a kind of infernal mockery, in which lives have been thrown away with reluctance on both sides, because neither could defy the contempt of the contemptible. Happily, such deaths have been confined to a limited sphere, composed chiefly of the more boisterous amongst military men, and of a particular class of political leaders and public characters. In the reign of James the First, the two sons of Lord Wharton and Lord Blantyre fell by the hands of each other at Islington; and the Earl of Dorset and Lord Bruce fought with swords under the walls of Antwerp, till Bruce fell down dead, and his opponent was borne wounded to a neighbouring monastery. In 1712, the Duke of Hamilton met Lord Mohun, whose hand was already red with other blood: they fought in Hyde Park, and both were fatally wounded. Forty years before, the profligate Duke of Buckingham slew the Earl of Shrewsbury, whose wife was his paramour, and was said to have held his bridle during the combat. One of the Lords Byron slew his neighbour in a quarrel rather than a duel; and the death

of the duellist closed the dissolute lives, in 1804, of Lord Camelford, and in 1809, of Lord Falkland. So died, too, Sir Alexander Boswell, the son of the biographer of Johnson; John Scott, an ingenious writer; and Pushkin, a distinguished poet of Russia. Ireland has been fruitful in such crimes: one Fitzgerald, who was hanged at last, had the bad eminence of having destroyed more lives in duels than any of his contemporaries. Men fell by the pistols of future judges; and the blood of an adversary left a stain of remorse on the conscience of such a man as O'Connell. In America, it must have clung painfully to the memory of Jackson in the devotions of his old age. Many have been these scenes of useless death on the soil of the republic. So fell one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence; so, the gallant, unreflecting Decatur; and so, by the shot of the vilest man remembered by American history, died Alexander Hamilton; just as his son had died before.

The savage encounter which knows no rules, such as is seen in the south-western portions of the United States, is the mere warfare of murder and self-defence, but of a self-defence that is generally not unwilling to become murder. It is horrible enough that our age should have invented the Bowie knife and the revolying pistol. It is more horrible that in the streets, in houses, even in the seats of law and justice, they have been drawn and wielded with fatal ferocity, by the men of Virginia, Kentucky, and Arkansas. The whole number of the victims of single combat in all ages is not vast; but if only a hundred in a year should thus perish throughout the world, many thousands must have been added, and with a terrible guilt of