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Oh, give me Fame !"-The laurel bough
Twined with the oak to wreathe his brow;
The trumpet pealed, and poet's lyre
Breathed forth his praise in words of fire:
He had his prayer-'twas his, the whole-
But grief sat heavy on his soul.

"Oh, give me Love !"-Bright lips were there,
Fair brows-than Parian stone more fair;
And eyes of loveliness undreamed
With Beauty's glorious spirit beamed:
He had his prayer-'twas his, the whole-
Yet grief sat heavy on his soul.

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DUELLING.*

SMALL as may be the number of truths which can be regarded as settled by the universal concurrence of mankind, beyond possibility of question or cavil, debating clubs are yet sometimes at a loss for suitable questions, of evenly balanced semblance of right and wrong, on which to excercise their young powers of logic and eloquence. We beg leave to suggest to them one of which we can confidently affirm, that it never can be decided to the one side or the other-Which is the greater in degree, after their respective kinds, the folly or the wickedness-the mental stupidity or the moral criminality of the practice of Duelling?

What a curious anomaly! What a wonderful absurdity! What a strange contradiction to all the fundamental ideas of the civilisation of those portions of the globe in which it prevails -so far at least, as those ideas are to be found on the surface of all their systems of law, religion, philosophy or ethics! It is really one of the most remarkable illustrations that can be adduced, of the ineradicable tenacity of a habit once deeply planted into national character, in the infancy of a new civilisation, however abhorrent it may really be to all the principles of that civilisation as they become afterward developed and matured by the progress of centuries. We owe the institution of the Duel-for it may be called an institution-to the barbarism of our Germanic origin, and it has continued ever since, in all the countries of Europe which have grown up out of the Germanic root. It has been in vain that that holy Religion, which has given to all that portion of the globe the designation of Christendom, has denounced it as damnable and deadly in its sinfulness. It has been in vain that Law, whether proceeding from despotic thrones or popular par

liaments, has decreed against it the last and worst terrors of punishment which it can attach to the highest of crimes against nature and society, stamping it on almost every statutebook as Murder. It has been in vain that the universal reason of men has pronounced against it, in every other mode of expression but that of action, as a bad, bloody, and brutal barbarism. All in vain! There it has stood, undestroyed, unharmed,--a great pervading practical fact-a living and strong reality, smiling at the superficial and frothy impotence of these attempts to put it down, much as we may suppose a big black rock, in the midst of the waves, to smile in contempt upon all the yesty fury with which they have been for centuries lashing its base. Would that good institutions among men were as tenacious of their existence, against the surrounding pressure of bad influences, as vice versa we see it of the bad, thus vainly assailed by all the arrayed antagonism of right reason and religion.

Nations are educated through the course of generations and centuries, as the individual through his little allotted span of years. As "the child is father to the man," so are there impressed, deeply and indelibly, on the latest maturity of the nation, the traits whose origin is to be sought far back in the earliest period of its barbaric youth. Endowed with all the rude energy and simple strength incident to that period of savage freshness of character and life, they not only mould to their own shape the entire system of habits of thought and sentiment, of the whole mass of the people, individually and collectively; but it would almost seem that by some of the mysterious laws yet unexplained by science, of the connection between the moral and physical in our wonderful duality of nature,

The History of Duelling: including Narratives of the most remarkable Personal Encounters that have taken place from the Earliest Period to the Present Time. By J. G. Millingen, M. D., F. Ř. S. Author of "Curiosities of Medical Experience," &c. 2 vols. 8vo. London. Richard Bentley, New Burlington street. 1841

VOL. XI.-NO. LI.

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they so impress themselves upon even the physical man, upon his brain and nervous system, that they become a vital and essential part of his nature, transmitted down, link after link, through the chain of generations, like any of the outward characteristics of form or feature, which mark the various distinctions of race familiar to every eye. In no other way can we explain to our satisfaction the tenacity with which nations are seen to cling to particular traits, like the one which suggests the remark, in spite of such an immense accumulation of counteracting causes, of a moral nature, which ought long ago to have swept away every trace of their existence.

We are sprung from what may be termed peculiarly a fighting stockand the pulpits of the Christianity we profess may preach peace as they please the old leaven continues to work too strongly up from the bottom to be overpowered by any precepts or principles of a moral nature, addressed to us from without; even though they may issue from an authority we bow to as divine, and though they may at the same time recommend themselves to our conscience and reason by demonstrative logic the most incontestable. All Christianity and all philosophy to the contrary notwithstanding, we have an instinctive and inextinguishable sympathy with the spirit of the strife. We love the bravery of the battle more than the highest heroism of purely moral fortitude. No glory, in the estimation of the great masses of the people, can compare with that of splendid military achievement. There is no baseness we despise with a disgust equal to that in spired in us by personal cowardice. Any danger must be dared-any deed, whether of guilt or folly, must be done-rather than be subject to the possibility of such a suspicion. When men fight duels-combining in one act the double wickedness and folly of attempted murder and hazarded suicide -had we ten times as much law, religion and morals against it, there is a universal public opinion, or public sentiment rather, which palliates and pardons even when it does not wholly justify. There is no class, no age, profession or sex, free from the influence of this tendency. And not only are many respectable opinions to be heard openly avowed, in all parts of the

country, in favor of the usefulness and necessity of the Duel in certain cases; but over the greater part of its extent, though not the whole, the force of the general opinion and practice in its favor is so strong, that it can only be resisted by a moral heroism of principle to which few indeed are equal.

To explain a fact so utterly anomalous, we are thrown back upon phrenology. The organs of combativeness and destructiveness, which we have inherited, as a race, from an ancestry with whom they were the seats of the highest recognized virtues, have yet such a predominance, that it is in vain that all the other organs through which the moral and intellectual faculties act, struggle to counterbalance them.

Upon the mutually acting and re-acting effect of such a national character upon its language and literature, we need not do more than advert in passing. How thoroughly, for example, all these ideas of bravery and bloody brutality are interwoven through the whole texture of our English literature, will be obvious to every reader at a glance. All its departments are more or less pervaded by them-some almost exclusively so, as history and poetry. While to illustrate their effect upon language-one of the most powerful agents in the moulding of a nation's character and destiny, as well as the most expressive record of what they have been-we need but look to the Greek and Latin, in which the very words that denote virtue were not only derived from roots involving the idea of martial prowess, but remained ever after synonymously applied to either. And it is a curious fact that even to the present day, in the modern languages derived from these originals, the traces yet remain of that far anteHomeric age when the word virtue, arcte, was derived from the name of the god of the battle-field, Arès; and when the degrees of comparison of the simplest and most common adjective in the language, good, better, best, were agathos, areion, aristos,-or, according to their derivative meaning, good, braver, bravest. In our word, "aristocracy," for example, intended to designate the "government of the best," appears still the mark of the old idea of the identity of goodness with military virtue.

But it is time to pass from these speculations to the book referred to at

the beginning of this Article, the subject of which has suggested them. These volumes abound with a mass of information, curious and entertaining, though at times revolting and sickening in the perusal. Tracing the practice of Duelling to its first rude original, it is exhibited through all the succeeding stages of its history,-its combination with the ordeal; the ferocity and treachery which often marked its primitive character; its modification by the institution of chivalry; and the subsequent phase it assumed in connection with the "point of honor." The first volume is the one of the chief interest, giving an account of its history in France, (its special classic ground), and the different countries of the continent, with notices of a vast number of the most remarkable instances of it in the different ages and reigns through which the narrative is carried along. The second volume relates chiefly to duelling in Great Britain, with a copious enumeration of many of the principal modern duels which have taken place in various countries-the United States not omitted.

Among the ancients the Duel was unknown; and even were there no better refutation of the modern arguments we sometimes hear in its justification, its absence among nations at the same time so polished and so military, and so careless of life and blood, as both the Greeks and Romans, would alone suffice to prove it to be a purely conventional and unnecessary absurdity. Neither blow nor insult was considered among them as requiring a "satisfaction" of this character-even though they possessed none of the restraints imposed on us by the principles of the religion we profess to believe. Themistocles could calmly reply to the menaced blow of Eurybiades, "Strike, but hear me !" Sophocles did not feel bound even to prosecute at law a man who had struck him-very sensibly replying to the friend who advised him to that course, "If a donkey kicked me, would you recommend me to go to law?" And the Roman law expressly stated that a blow did not dishonor"Ictus fustium infamiam non importat," the translation of which, we fear, would hardly go down in our day, except with the New England NonResistants," that "there's no disgrace in a caning."

It was out of the depths of their swarming forests that the Germanic tribes which inundated all the rest of Europe, carried with them a practice that had grown out of the fierce military spirit-combined with a high pride of personal independencewhich was their chief characteristic. Among a nation of warriors, who never assembled but in arms, a fight was the simplest and most natural mode of settling any difference, espe cially in the absence of any system of civil institutions adequate to the dispensation of justice. It was in direct analogy with that custom of war between nation and nation, for the settlement of public quarrels, which was their chief and favorite occupation; and as, in the one case, the state of hostility involved all the members of the respective communities or bodies politic; so, in the other, the private war between two individuals usually embraced the whole circle of kindred and dependents of both parties, in feuds which often became perpetuated through many generations. When Christianity attacked this new society of military barbarism-which thus flooded over all Europe, to conquer it to her own milder moral dominion-she was forced, naturally as well as necessarily, to a certain extent, to harmonize with and assimilate herself to it. Had she spoken to it only in the sweet and gentle tones which fell from the lips of the Prince of Peace himself when on earth, she might as well have addressed herself to the wolves and bears haunting the same forests which poured forth these same savage hordes it was to be her mission to civilize. She, therefore, was fain to accompany the wild warrior whose soul she was to save, into the midst of the scenes of carnage from which she might not hope nor attempt to withhold him-ill as the battle-stains of blood and dust with which her white robe became there polluted, befitted the meek loveliness of aspect properly belonging to her heavenly birth. If she could not then-as she is yet destined to do!-if she could not then wrest the sword from his hand, to beat it into a ploughshare, she could at least hilt it with the Cross. If she could not renew the miracle of the great Author of the Gospel, and say to the fierce waves of human passions amidst which she had to walk,

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Peace, be still!"-she could at least in a degree mitigate, and sometimes even guide their rage. She could rear sanctuaries, and afford shelter within the shadow of her altar, to those for whom no other mercy remained on earth. She could give the world at least a periodical interval of repose, by enacting a "Truce of God," from Wednesday evening to Monday morning of each week, though she had to bless the very arms which through the rest of the time were to be given to an eager industry of carnage and rapine. And by leading off all the most restless military energies of the age to spend themselves upon the barbarian soil of foreign continents, in crusades for the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre, she could at the same time leave at least a partial tranquillity at home, and elevate and sanctify, by a high spirituality of motive, the passions and the efforts which were else unqualifiedly bad, base, and brutal. And that same Christianity, acting on the same principle and tendency, took up the practice of private combat; and, since she could not prevent it, she strove to moderate it. In the absence of other and better machinery of justice for the government of society and the protection of right against oppression, she invoked the interference of Heaven to bless even this, rude and imperfect as it was, to that end; and, taking a hint, partly from the Levitical law of the ordeal, and partly from the consciousness present to every heart and arm of increased courage and strength lent to both by a righteous cause, she thus converted the Duel into the Judicial Combat.

And there can be no doubt but that, absurd as we justly regard it as a mode of ascertaining and executing the justice of all controversies, the Judicial Combat was a great deal better than nothing a great deal better than what would probably have been the state of things without it. An infirm person was not always bound to fight in person. A champion could be substituted--and champions were more easily to be found in those days than probably in the present. And when we consider the moral influence of the clear and the foul conscience, with the imposing effect, in an age so superstitious, of all the solemnities usually added by the Church to these occa

sions-calculated to sustain the true heart with a spiritual strength which might well be mistaken for supernatural, and to unnerve the false one with a corresponding terror and trembling-we must do our rude and simple old ancestors at least the justice of confessing, that there was a great deal more of sense and reason in their Judicial Combat which we so much abuse, than in our Duel which, in practice, we so universally sustain. As in most of Sir Walter Scott's pictures of apparent fiction, yet designed to convey the more vivid illustration of a valuable historical truth, the scene of the great warrior who went down, in the lists, with his guilty cause, before the feeble touch of a lance which at another time he would have felt only as the shock of a reed or a rush, was intended to illustrate the meaning of the institution thus exhibited; and to represent a not unfrequent occurrence, in those days of whose spirit he was himself the last representative and the last minstrel.

The institution of chivalry brought a fresh modification to the Duel, and stamped upon it the character of which it retains deep traces to the present day. It created the "point of honor." If fighting had before been necessary, to defend the head with the hand, it now became fashionable. While the mock fights of tilts and tournaments beguiled the intervals of repose, it was equally a duty and a delight to seek or to make all the opportunities possible for indulging in earnest in this the chief honor and business of life. And while glory for ever stimulated the knight to fresh feats of prowess, love was ever ready to reward them, with the brightest smiles and tenderest delights that beauty could bestow on bravery. It has been well said that man is called a "reasoning animal" because he has never any difficulty in finding a reason for the indulgence of his inclination. When everybody, therefore, was perfectly willing to fight everybody else, with or without cause

and on the whole, probably, would rather do so than not-nothing was more easy or natural than the gradual establishment of a punctilious "code of honor," which should furnish "reasons as plenty as blackberries." For example, it was early established as a maxim of this "common law" of

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