stirrup when he heard the voice of a suppliant. "O son of the uncle of the apostle of God, I am a traveler, and in distress!" He instantly dismounted to present the pilgrim with his camel, her rich caparison, and a purse of four thousand pieces of gold, excepting only the sword, either for its intrinsic value, or as a gift of an honored kinsman. The servant of Kais informed the second suppliant that his master was asleep; but he immediately added, "Here is a purse of seven thousand pieces of gold (it is all we have in the house); and here is an order, that will entitle you to a camel and a slave : the master, as soon as he awoke, praised and enfranchised his faithful steward, with a gentle reproof, that by respecting his slumbers he had stinted his bounty. The third of these heroes, the blind Arabah, at the hour of prayer was supporting his steps on the shoulders of two slaves. Alas!" he replied, "my coffers are empty! but these you may sell if you refuse, I renounce them." At these words, pushing away the youths, he groped along the wall with his staff. The character of Hatem is the perfect model of Arabian virtue; he was brave and liberal, an eloquent poet, and a successful robber: forty camels were roasted at his hospitable feast; and at the prayer of a suppliant enemy he restored both the captives and the spoil. The freedom of his countrymen disdained the laws of justice; they proudly indulged the spontaneous impulse of pity and benevolence. 66 : Ir was on that day or rather night, of the 27th June, 1787, between the hours of eleven and twelve, that I wrote the last line of the last page of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire in a summerhouse in my garden.* After laying down my pen, I took several turns in a covered walk of acacias, which commands a prospect of the country, the lake, and the mountains. The air was temperate, the sky was serene, the silver orb of the moon was reflected from the waters, and all nature was silent. I will not dissemble the first emotions of joy on recovery of my freedom, and perhaps the establishment of my fame. But my pride was soon humbled, and a sober melancholy was spread over my mind, by the idea that I had taken an everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion, and that, whatsoever might be the future date of my History, the life of the historian must be short and precarious. * Gibbon was then living at Lausanne, Switzerland. JEFFERSON. 1743-1826. THOMAS JEFFERSON was born in Virginia in 1743 and died in 1826. He will live forever in the memory of Americans as the author of The Declaration of Independence. He was President of the United States, 1801-9; was Governor of Virginia, Member of Congress, Minister to France, Secretary of State, etc. He is best known in literature by his Notes on Virginia, privately printed in Paris in 1782; but none of his writings afford a clearer idea of his style than does this extract from his view of the character of Washington. Hon. Edward Everett said of Jefferson: "On Jefferson rests the imperishable renown of having penned the Declaration of Independence. To have been the instrument of expressing, in one brief, decisive act, the consecrated will and resolution of a whole family of States; of unfolding, in one all-important manifesto, the causes, the motives, and the justification of this great movement in human affairs to have been permitted to give the impress and peculiarity of his mind to a charter of public rights, destined to an importance in the estimation of men equal to anything human ever borne on parchment or expressed in the visible signs of thought; - this is the glory of Thomas Jefferson." ; CHARACTER OF WASHINGTON. His mind was great and powerful, without being of the very first order; his penetration strong, though not so acute as that of Newton,* Bacon,† or Locke; ‡ and as far as he saw, no judgment was ever sounder. It was slow in operation, being little aided by invention or imagination, but sure in conclusion. Hence the common remark of his officers, of the advantage he derived from councils of war, where, hearing all suggestions, he selected whatever was best; and certainly no general ever planned his battles more judiciously. But if deranged during the course of the action, if any member of his plan was dislocated by sudden circumstances, he was slow in a readjustment. The consequence was, that he often failed in the field, and rarely against an enemy in station, as at Boston and York. He was incapable of fear, meeting personal dangers with the calmest unconcern. Perhaps the strongest feature in his character was prudence, never acting until every circumstance, every consideration, was maturely weighed; refraining if he saw a doubt, but when once decided, going through with his purpose, whatever obstacles opposed. His integrity was most pure, his justice the most inflexible I have ever * NEWTON. An illustrious English philosopher and mathematician, born 1642. (See Brewster's Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton.) + BACON. One of the greatest lawyers and philosophers that ever lived, born 1561. (See Campbell's Lives of the Lord Chancellors.) 1632. LOCKE. The author of the celebrated Essay on the Human Understanding, born in England, known; no motives of interest or consanguinity, of friendship or hatred, being able to bias his decision. He was, indeed, in every sense of the words, a wise, a good, and a great man. His temper was naturally irritable and high toned; but reflection and resolution had obtained a firm and habitual ascendency over it. If ever, however, it broke its bounds, he was most tremendous in his wrath. In his expenses he was honorable, but exact; liberal in contributions to whatever promised utility; but frowning and unyielding on all visionary projects, and all unworthy calls on his charity. His heart was not warm in its affections; but he exactly calculated every man's value, and gave him a solid esteem proportioned to it. His person, you know, was fine, his stature exactly what one would wish; his deportment easy, erect, and noble, the best horseman of his age, and the most graceful figure that could be seen on horseback. Although in the circle of his friends, where he might be unreserved with safety, he took a free share in conversation, his colloquial talents were not above mediocrity, possessing neither copiousness of ideas nor fluency of words. In public, when called on for a sudden opinion, he was unready, short, and embarrassed. Yet he wrote readily, rather diffusely, in an easy and correct style. This he had acquired by conversation with the world, for his education was merely reading, writing, and common arithmetic, to which he added surveying at a later day. His time was employed in action chiefly, reading little, and that only in agriculture and English history. His correspondence became necessarily extensive, and with journalizing his agricultural proceedings occupied most of his leisure hours within doors. On the whole, his character was, in its mass, perfect, in nothing bad, in few points indifferent; and it may truly be said, that never did nature and fortune combine more completely to make a man great, and to place him in the same constellation with whatever worthies have merited from man an everlasting remembrance. For his was the singular destiny and merit of leading the armies of his country successfully through an arduous war, for the establishment of its independence; of conducting its councils through the birth of a government, new in its forms and principles, until it had settled down into a quiet and orderly train; and of scrupulously obeying the laws through the whole of his career, civil and military, of which the history of the world furnishes no other example. BURNS. 1759-1796. ROBERT BURNS, the son of a small farmer, was born near Ayr, Scotland, in 1759, and died in 1796. He manifested at an early age an eager appetite for learning; but his opportunities for gratifying it were few: in the country school he gained the rudiments of an education in English branches, and in later life learned something of French, Latin, and the higher mathematics. It is worthy of note that one of his favorite books, in boyhood, was Shakespeare's Plays. At the age of sixteen he began to write verses, striving to express in rhyme the emotions excited by his first affair of the heart. These youthful compositions were circulated in manuscript among his acquaintances, and finally came to the notice of some persons of literary taste, who persuaded Burns to publish a volume. The venture brought him fame at once, and twenty pounds, one hundred dollars, in money. He visited Edinburgh on invitation of Dr. Blacklock, and was well received in the brilliant society of that city. A second edition of his poems, published in 1787, yielded him a profit of seven hundred pounds. But his gain in fame and money from his visit to the Scottish capital was more than offset by his acquisition of the dissolute habits which were destined to impede his literary progress and ultimately to bring him to an early grave. His rank among poets it is not easy to determine, though Lord Byron and Allan Cunningham placed him among the first. It is probable that in their estimates they regarded his promise rather than his performance. But it may safely be said that of all poets who have sprung from the people, receiving almost no aid from education, he was surely the greatest. He was the poet of passion and feeling but his utterances were simple and natural, and owed none of their force or beauty to art. His poems glow with tenderness and the love of freedom, and are rich in a rare, pure humor that none have known how to imitate. |