of Granby at 49, Davoust at 53, Massena and Augereau at 59, Collingwood at 61, Cortez at 62, Anson at 65, Washington at 67, Suwarrow at 71, Marlborough at 72, Howe at 73, Rodney at 74, Amherst at 80, Hood at 82, Townshend and Dumourier at 84. Amongst sovereigns, Alexander died at 32, Titus at 40, Canute at 41, Napoleon at 51, Henry the Seventh at 52, Charles the Fifth at 58, Marcus Aurelius at 60, Adrian at 62, Ferdinand and Isabella at 63, Severus and Henry the First at 65, Edward the Third at 66, Elizabeth at 68, Vespasian at 69, Tamerlane at 71, Antoninus Pius at 74, Augustus, and Cosmo de Medici at 75, Richard Cromwell at 86, and Artaxerxes Mnemon at 94. The progress of society in cultivation and in the arts of peace and the science of health, have doubtless postponed a little the average limit of life. Its utmost term is probably unchangeable; and those examples of longevity which have approached that term were due to no influence of social improvement. Ten thousand human beings set forth together on their journey. After ten years, one third at least has disappeared. At the middle point of the common measure of life, but half are still upon the road. Fast and faster, as the ranks grow thinner, they that remained till now, become weary, and lie down, and rise no more. At threescore and ten a band of some four hundred yet struggles on. At ninety, these have been reduced to a handful of thirty trembling patriarchs. Year after year, they fall in diminishing numbers. One lingers, perhaps, a lonely marvel, till the century is over. We look again, and the work of death is finished. VI. The First Death. "Javan!" said Enoch, " on this spot began { 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 arms. 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 hist 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 of ten, 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, |