The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, No. 57, July, 1862. Various

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      'T was just no children's play,—

      A ball hit me a grievous blow,

      And in the crowd I lay;

      Nigh death, they bore me from the scene,

      My garments off they fling,

      Yet held I fast by my canteen,—

      There drank from it—my King!

      And finally, a song for all the campaigns of life:—

      FROUDE'S HENRY THE EIGHTH

      The spirit of historical criticism in the present age is on the whole a charitable spirit. Many public characters have been heard through their advocates at the bar of history, and the judgments long since passed upon them and their deeds, and deferentially accepted for centuries, have been set aside, and others of a widely different character pronounced. Julius Caesar, who was wont to stand as the model usurper, and was regarded as having wantonly destroyed Roman liberty in order to gratify his towering ambition, is now regarded as a political reformer of the very highest and best class,—as the man who alone thoroughly understood his age and his country, and who was Heaven's own instrument to rescue unnumbered millions from the misrule of an oligarchy whose members looked upon mankind as their proper prey. He did not overthrow the freedom of Rome, but he took from Romans the power to destroy the personal freedom of all the races by them subdued. He identified the interests of the conquered peoples with those of the central government, so far as that work was possible,—thus proceeding in the spirit of the early Roman conquerors, who sought to comprehend even the victims of their wars in the benefits which proceeded from those wars. This view of his career is a sounder one than that which so long prevailed, and which enabled orators to round periods with references to the Rubicon. It is not thirty years since one of the first of American statesmen told the national Senate that "Julius Caesar struck down Roman liberty at Pharsalia," and probably there was not one man in his audience who supposed that he was uttering anything beyond a truism, though they must have been puzzled to discover any resemblance between "the mighty Julius" and Mr. Martin Van Buren, the gentleman whom the orator was cutting up, and who was actually in the chair while Mr. Calhoun was seeking to kill him, in a political sense, by quotations from Plutarch's Lives. We have learnt something since 1834 concerning Rome and Caesar as well as of our own country and its chiefs, and the man who should now bring forward the conqueror of Gaul as a vulgar usurper would be almost as much laughed at as would be that man who should insist that General Jackson destroyed American liberty when he removed the deposits from the national bank. The facts and fears of one generation often furnish material for nothing but jests and jeers to that generation's successors; and we who behold a million of men in arms, fighting for or against the American Union, and all calling themselves Americans, are astonished when we read or remember that our immediate predecessors in the political world went to the verge of madness on the Currency question. Perhaps the men of 1889 may be equally astonished, when they shall turn to files of newspapers that were published in 1862, and read therein the details of those events that now excite so painful an interest in hundreds of thousands of families. Nothing is so easy as to condemn the past, except the misjudging of the present, and the failure to comprehend the future.

      Men of a very different stamp from the first of the Romans have been allowed the benefits that come from a rehearing of their causes. Robespierre, whose deeds are within the memory of many yet living, has found champions, and it is now admitted by all who can effect that greatest of conquests, the subjugation of their prejudices, that he was an honest fanatic, a man of iron will, but of small intellect, who had the misfortune, the greatest that can fall to the lot of humanity, to be placed by the force of circumstances in a position which would have tried the soundest of heads, even had that head been united with the purest of hearts. But the apologists of "the sea-green incorruptible," it must be admitted, have not been very successful, as the sence of mankind revolts at indiscriminate murder, even when the murderer's hands have no other stain than that which comes from blood,—for that is a stain which will not "out"; not even printer's ink can erase or cover it; and the attorney of Arras must remain the Raw-Head and Bloody-Bones of history. Benedict Arnold has found no direct defender or apologist; but those readers who are unable to see how forcibly recent writers have dwelt upon the better points of his character and career, while they have not been insensible to the provocations he received, must have read very carelessly and uncritically indeed. Mr. Paget has all but whitewashed Marlborough, and has shaken many men's faith in the justice of Lord Macauley's judgement and in the accuracy of his assertions. Richard III., by all who can look through the clouds raised by Shakespeare over English history of the fifteenth century, is admitted to have been a much better man and ruler than were the average of British monarchs from the Conquest to the Revolution, thanks to the labors of Horace Walpole and Caroline Halsted, who, however, have only followed in the path struck out by Sir George Buck at a much earlier period. The case of Mary Stuart still remains unsettled, and bids fair to be the Jarndyce and Jarndyce case of history; but this is owing to the circumstance that that unfortunate queen is СКАЧАТЬ