DEBASING SPIRIT OF REVENGE. who kindness will requite, But, injured once, revenge is his delight,— 25 The tale preceding it is one of implacable vindictiveness, and includes this passage of colloquy between two differing spirits, on the subject of taking advantage of a rare and tempting opportunity : "Revenge was thine-thou hadst the power, the right; 66 Tell me not, sir, of rights, and wrongs, or powers! Like Corneille's Antiochus: F'en laisse la vengeance aux dieux qui les connaissent; and we have only to turn the page to find him congratulated, inasmuch as, by the seeming intervention of a higher Power, La coupable est punie, et vos mains innocents. Parson Dale calls revenge the sin of the uninstructed: the savage deems it noble, but Christ's religion, which is the sublime civilizer, emphatically condemns it. Why? "Because religion ever seeks to ennoble man; and nothing so debases him as revenge." One who cherishes that passion is bidden look into his own heart, and tell whether, since he has so cherished it, he has not felt all sense of right and wrong confused-thus, whatever would before have seemed to him mean and base, appears now but just means to his ill ends. When Jane Eyre, as a child, tastes for the first time something of vengeance, "as aromatic wine it seemed, on swallowing, warm and racy," she says; "its after-flavour, metallic and corroding, gave me a sensation as if I had been poisoned." The confession reads like a paraphrase of Dryden's lines, indicating how, were sounder principles received and acted upon in this world of ours, 26 FUMES OF GRATIFIED VENGEANCE. “Revenge would into charity be changed, And when 'tis compassed leaves a sting behind." Achilles, in the eighteenth book of the Iliad, speaks of wrath and revenge as "far, far too dear to every mortal breast, sweet to the soul as honey to the taste, gathering like vapours of a noxious kind from fiery blood, and darkening all the mind." When Ramorny desires to know what is the precious privilege in store for him, a prostrate, mutilated, crippled wretch, for whom nevertheless his wily physician promises such a treat to come, "The dearest that mankind knows," is Dwining's answer; and then, in the accent of a lover who utters the name of his beloved mistress, and expresses his passion for her in the very tone of his voice, he adds the word "Revenge." In the hour of Elizabeth's humiliation, Schiller's Mary Stuart declares herself to be now happy indeed; after whole years of sorrow and abasement, one moment of victorious revenge. "I plunged the steel in my oppressor's breast. She carries death within her breast. I know it." Mr. de Quincey calls revenge a luxury, to those who can rejoice in it at all, so inebriating that possibly a man would be equally liable to madness, from the perfect gratification of his vindictive hatred or its perfect defeat. Of Blucher in Paris he says, "I have often wondered that he did not go mad with the fumes of gratified vengeance." But after all, the pleasure of revenge is likened by Jeremy Taylor to the pleasure of eating chalk and coals; a foolish disease made the appetite, and it is entertained with an evil reward; it is like the feeding of a cancer or a wolf; "the man is restless till it be done, and when it is, every man sees how infinitely he is removed from satisfaction or felicity." Yet seems it as though never would human . FRENZIED RAPTURE OF REVENGE. 27 nature outgrow a relish for sweetness which sweet singers are fain to glorify; as when one of them sings that though sweet are our home recollections, though sweet are the tears that from tenderness fall, though sweet are our friendships, our hopes, our affections, revenge on a tyrant is sweetest of all. Does the reader remember St. Simon's frank-perhaps brutally frank-avowal of his rapture at the fall of the Duc du Maine? Dying with joy, he describes himself; so oppressed that he feared he must swoon; his heart dilated to such an excess, that it no longer found room to beat. "The violence I did myself, in order to let nothing escape me, was infinite; yet was this torment itself delicious. I had triumphed, I was revenged; I swam in my vengeance; I enjoyed the full accomplishment of desires the most vehement and continuous of all my life." We can fancy him prompt with an affirmative reply to each of those queries of Owen Feltham's which were meant to elicit a negative: Will it ease me, when I am vexed, to vex another? Can another's suffering pain take off from my smart? etc. A kind of frenzy, that old English moralist styles it, "and something irrational, because another hath done us a mischief, to hurt therefore ourselves that we may do him one. Perhaps it was from hence that poets have feigned that Nemesis was transformed by Jupiter into a goose (a silly creature), to show us the folly of revenge; for, at best, it is but returning evil for evil. And while we throw a petty vengeance on the head of our offending brother, we boldly pull the Almighty's on our own." When David, by what South terms a "happy and seasonable pacification" in the matter of Nabal, was "taken off from acting that bloody tragedy which he was just entering upon," he turned his eyes from the baseness of the churl who had excited his spirit of vengeance, to the . 28 AFTER BITTERNESS OF SWEET REVENGE. goodness of that God who had prevented it, and so broke forth into the doxology, "Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, who has kept me this day from shedding blood, and from avenging myself with my own hand." The moral of Mr. Taylor's play of the Fool's Revenge is expressed in the Fool's cry towards its close, "I would have grasp'd Heaven's vengeance, and have drawn The bolt on my own head." Milton's Satan has a like tale to tell, where he soliloquizes that "Revenge, at first though sweet, Bitter ere long, back on itself recoils." Again and again in various of his works the late Lord Lytton was strenuous in writing down a cherished spirit of vindictiveness. His Maltravers tells Cæsarini, there are injuries so great, that they defy revenge: "Let us alike, since we are alike injured, trust our cause to Him who reads all hearts, and, better than we can do, measures both crime and its excuses. Let us rather seek to be the judges of ourselves, than the executioners of another." In almost his latest fiction he speaks of "the devil's grand luxury, Revenge,”—and of man's mimetic folly in adding evil to evil, to retort on the man who wrongs, or even on "the Arch-Invisible who afflicts you." Of all our passions, is not Revenge, he asks, the one into which enters with most zest, a devil? For what is a devil?—A being whose sole work on earth, as this author defines it, is some revenge on God. HEAVINESS FOR A NIGHT, JOY IN THE MORNING. PSALM XXX. 5. HEAVINESS may endure for a night; and the night may be in winter, mid-winter, when the nights are long. But the longest night has its limit. The profoundest darkness has its appointed term, and then day breaks, and the shadows flee away. Gladness revives with the dawn. Joy cometh in the morning. Though it tarry, wait for it; it will surely come, though it seem to tarry. "Schon verloschen sind die Stunden, Hingeschwunden Schmerz und Glück; When the Light of the World was about to be withdrawn from the children of light, they were told that they should be sorrowful, but their sorrow should be turned into joy. "And ye now therefore have sorrow : but I will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice." Rejoice with the rising of the bright and morning star. Often it is keenly felt to be darkest and dreariest just * Which lines from Goethe have been thus Englished by that master of graceful translation, Mr. Theodore Martin: "See, the hours of night have vanished, Joy and grief have passed away ; |