Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 102.djvu/430

412 during the revolutions and agitations of two hemispheres, between the triumphs of consul Nero and of Sir Edward Codrington, a national sensation of the kind had, at some time or other (for the time is long), and in some country or another (for the space is large), been experienced: but no; the historian's never is inexorable, and nothing but Metaurus can answer to Navarino, nothing but Navarino to Metaurus. Occasionally, indeed, when the Alisonian method of rounding a period admits of or requires it, a wider latitude is conceded: as where it is said, of the massacre in the island of Chios (1822), that "modern Europe had never witnessed such an instance of bloodshed or horror. To find a parallel to it we must go back to the storming of Syracuse or Carthage by the Romans, or the sack of Bagdad or Aleppo by the arms of Timour." Of Navarino again, we learn, that "never, save by the taking of Jerusalem, in 1199, by the crusading warriors under Godfrey of Bouillon, had so unanimous a feeling of exultation pervaded the Christian world." The abandonment by the Czar Nicholas of the siege of Silistria, in 1828, and his perilous voyage to Odessa, "furnished to the journalists of Europe ample ground for comparison with the flight of Xerxes across the Hellespont after the defeat of Salanis, two thousand years before." The mots of Charles X., it appears, became historical, so "extraordinary" was that prince's "turn for felicitous colloquy;" "repeated from one end of Europe to the other, they rivalled the most celebrated of Henry IV. in warmth of heart, and the most felicitous of Louis XIV. in terseness of expression." (Ah, that Sir Archibald would but cultivate the gift he thus makes characteristic of the Grand Monarque!) Speaking of Napoleon, again, "It is easy to see from his expressions and style of expression, that if he had not equalled Alexander in the lustre of his conquests, he was qualified to have rivalled Homer in the brilliancy of his conceptions." The "sufferings and privations" caused by Strikes, "often come to equal anything recorded in the darkest days of history—the siege of Jerusalem, or the blockade of Haarlem." So ruthless was revolutionary fury in eastern Spain, in 1821, that "the annals of the Roman proscriptions, of Athenian cruelty, of French atrocity, may be searched in vain for a similar instance of general, deliberate, and deeply-devised popular vengeance." The "Russian army exhibits a combination of physical strength and intellectual power … which no other country in modern times can exhibit, and to find a parallel to which we must go back to the Roman legions in the days of Trajan or Severus." Had the Russian insurgents in 1826 gained their purpose, "even the Reign of Terror in France would have been but a shadow of what must have ensued;—the proscriptions of Marius and Sylla, the slaughter of Nero, the centralised unmitigated despotism of the Lower Empire, could alone have been looked for." The alarming crisis of 1797," threatening a national bankruptcy, "was surmounted with ease, by the simple device of declaring the Bank of England notes, like the treasury bonds in the second Punic War, a legal tender"—which Roman policy, "more even than the slaughter on the Metaurus, the triumph of Zama, determined the fate of the ancient world." "The journey of Ferdinand (VII.) from Valencia to Madrid (1814) was the exact counterpart of that of Charles II. from Dover to London, a hundred and fifty-three years before;" and so