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 army of Turkish 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 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 IX. Death in Single Combat. "For double murder armed, his own, and his 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 |