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 revolving 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

their own, to the company of the murdered: besides, the many thousands, who fell under the test of a mistaken ordeal, and the hosts of wretched gladiators,

"Butchered to make a Roman holiday."

X.

Death in Battle.

"Last noon beheld them full of lusty life,
Last eve in beauty's circle proudly gay:
The midnight brought the signal-sound of strife;
The morn, the marshalling in arms; the day,
Battle's magnificently stern array:

The thunder-clouds close o'er it, which when rent,
The earth is covered thick with other clay
Which its own clay shall cover; heaped and pent,
Rider and horse, friend, foe, in one red burial blent."

BYRON.

WHEN men became tribes and nations, the danger of national contest arose: the utmost height of contention would be war; the utmost point of war would be battle; the utmost point of battle, death. The superior authority of laws might restrain the strife of individuals; but for nations, commonly, there has been no higher tribunal on earth. They have taken up arms: every age has had its wars and to the traveller along the road of history, tales of battles are like vast and frequent mounds, marking the distances, but at the same time covering the bones of armies.

Many of the more barbarous tribes have lived in such perpetual warfare, that a fourth or even half of their mature male population may have died by the weapons of their enemies. The islands of the Pacific, the forests of America, the almost unknown heart of Africa, have been the scenes of ten thousand unrecorded conflicts; and such must have filled many of the more favoured

lands at periods of which no history is left. The little that we know of countries like Japan, Madagascar, Abyssinia, and many portions of the East, is but a story of revolutions and slaughter. Historic wars begin with those of Nimrod, "a mighty one on the earth" within two or three centuries after the flood, the founder of the great empire of Assyria. A century or two later, the combat of four kings against five in the vale of Siddim was doubtless but one amongst many struggles of inferior princes. Nine hundred years after the deluge, the Israelites conquered Canaan: every step was a battle. Perhaps it was in the next century that twenty-five thousand men of Benjamin, with their households, almost all the tribe, perished in a contest with the other tribes, in which the victors also lost forty thousand. In the next century, as is probable, ten thousand Moabites fell before Ehud; and in the next, the host of Sisera before Barak, and the vast array of the Midianites before "the sword of the Lord and of Gideon." The next century witnessed the wars of Jephthah, when forty-two thousand Ephraimites were cut off, and those between Israel and the Philistines, when thirty thousand Israelites fell in one disastrous day. Not far from the same period was the siege of Troy; and then, in the eleventh century before the Incarnation were the wars of Saul and of David. In the tenth century are placed the mighty expeditions of Sesostris, and the wars between Abijah and Jeroboam. The ninth beheld the battle of Ramothgilead, and the hostilities between Syria and the ten tribes of Israel. In the eighth, the Assyrians extended their conquests, and swept those tribes away; while the first Messenian war introduced the drama of authentic Grecian history. The seventh was the period of the