cular power that sank the pebbles from the mountain-brook in the Philistine's forehead. We have, in the second book of Samuel, a list of the grandees of David's court, arranged according to the magnitude and daring of their single-handed feats of strength. We might select from the list, as illustrating what in those early ages constituted greatness, the description of Benaiah, who under Solomon united the congenial offices, which the needless fastidiousness of later ages has disjoined, of commander-in-chief and executioner in detail." He slew," we are told, two lion-like men of Moab; he went down also and slew a lion in the midst of a pit in time of snow; and he slew an Egyptian, a goodly man; and the Egyptian had a spear in his hand; but he went down to him with a staff, and plucked the spear out of the Egyptian's hand, and slew him with his own spear. These things did Benaiah, the son of Jehoiada, and had the name among three mighty men."

Authentic profane history reaches not back so far as the age of David; but the same features of the early ages, which the sacred record preserves in distinct outline, are portrayed in exaggerated forms in classic fable. The earliest sons of earth were the Titans, who in war with Jupiter piled Ossa upon Pelion, and leafy Olympus upon Ossa. With them we have also the vast Cyclopean monsters, and Briareus with his hundred-armed brethren. From the same mythological antiquity comes down to us the story of Hercules, the ideal of isolated man in his fullest physical development, but destitute of self-control, of practical wisdom, of the power of combining his energies with those of other men, and of all lofty mental and moral attributes. Though Homer belongs in part to a higher stage of progress, we yet find in the Iliad very numerous traces of this merely physical standard of merit. His Achilles, with now and then a softening touch of magnanimity and tenderness, generally appears an invincible, invulnerable, bloodthirsty man-butcher; and many of the characteristic epithets attached to the names of his heroes denote only different modifications of brute force. Many of his battle scenes in the Trojan war are mere conflicts between man and man, the interest being of the same kind with that which attaches itself to a modern wrestling match between two nearly equal champions.

The pyramids and other massive monuments of Egypt tell a like story as to her early standard of greatness. Unsightly,

misshapen structures, as many of them are, they could not have been piled up with any architectural design, but must have been intended simply to astonish and confound posterity by the inconceivable amount of labor expended in their construction.

The earliest employments, for which physical strength was coveted and prized, were probably aggressive only on inanimate nature and savage beasts. But, with the pastoral habits and the roving husbandry of those rude ages, there must soon have sprung up collisions between different families and tribes, at first about the use of pastures and of wells, and then from the habit of quarrelling and the transmission of enmities from generation to generation. But in those primitive times, the rights of soil and of water were contested on the spot by the weapons which nature gave, reinforced by the knotted club alone. Those wars, unlike the modern, were decisive; the victorious party remained in possession, while the vanquished were not left in a position to negotiate. As the tribes, at first composed of collateral branches of the same family, grew into nations, wars were conducted by greater numbers, but still for many centuries in essentially the same mode. Tactics, stratagem, and military discipline were unknown. When large bodies of men fought with each other, it was by a promiscuous rush and mutual onslaught. But often the armies were only the lookers on, while the fighting was reserved for mere handfuls of men, or for single champions on either side. This last was the case between the Philistines and the Israelites, when the two hosts faced each other day after day on opposite mountains, while Goliath daily challenged the Israelites to produce a man who should decide the conflict with him alone. Many such duels are on record in the earliest periods of profane history.

But war gradually grew into an art, then into a science. In the process of time, there were invented weapons which demanded more skill than strength for their successful use, — weapons, too, which depended for their efficiency on the artificial arrangements and concerted movements of those who wielded them. Fortifications also began to be constructed, to defend the weak against the strong and the few against the many; and hence the siege, with its complicated tactics, its heavy machinery, its alternate feints, assaults, circumvallations, mining and scaling, often took the place of tumultuous warfare on the open field. Success in war then demanded a higher

order of talent than before. A strong man was no longer of necessity a great one. Hercules would probably have never left the ranks. To plan campaigns, to arrange supplies, to ascertain the capacity of places and positions, to inspire confidence and courage, to furnish in one's own character rallying-points for the enthusiasm of thousands, to be at once careful and long-sighted for the future and prompt and keen for the present emergency, to be no less sagacious than brave, no less prudent than resolute, these were the functions demanded of the general, as the art of war developed itself. And in the supreme homage which now began to be paid to military talent we trace the first marked stage in the progress of society. And a very important stage this was ; for mili tary talent, though employed for an end on which humanity frowns and to which true religion lends no sanction, was still talent, and not mere muscle; it was mind and soul, and was connected with many commanding virtues and lofty manifestations of character. The supremacy of military genius lasted from the early days of Greece down to the Middle Ages. For that whole period, the great commander was the great man, and victory the surest avenue to fame.

The Grecian states were military aristocracies; and deeds of arms, conquests and defeats, constitute almost the only epochs in their history. No man, who had not served in the armies, was deemed worthy a place among men ; and of those who distinguished themselves in other departments, most, like Socrates, had received an honorable discharge from the toils of war. Only in Athens did literature, philosophy, and pure art win largely on the popular esteem; and even there they occupied the second rank and discharged a servile office. The great Attic historians were chiefly chroniclers of the wars of Greece. Poetry was most prized as embalming the fame of heroes, and keeping the laurels of victory green. Art transmitted in enduring marble the exploits of Marathon and of Salamis, or expended her highest efforts in honor of the tutelar Minerva,the goddess much more of war than of wisdom. The state of the Grecian mind as to letters may be judged from the relative estimation in which Homer's two great epics were held. Immemorial tradition makes the Iliad his masterpiece; and modern scholars therefore deem themselves bound to regard it with unlimited admiration, and to trace marks of servility in the very features of

the Odyssey that give it its greatest naturalness and beauty. But the youth who brings to both a mind untrammelled by the prescriptive authority of great names reads the Iliad, while he revels in the Odyssey; and if, instead of having been always known and commented upon, they had both been just now disinterred from age-long oblivion, and placed side by side for the unbiased verdict of modern Christendom, we doubt not that the Odyssey would bear the palm. It is evidently the fruit of riper genius, it is richer than the Iliad both in incident and in character, it is full of those portraitures of common life, of those touches of unsophisticated nature, that never grow old, — it unfolds the varied workings of passion, love, hatred, curiosity, fidelity, devotion, in an endless diversity of scene and circumstance, it domesticates us with its heroes, and, from the swineherd to the king, gives us a series of speaking likenesses, which, once beheld, hang forever in the picture-gallery of the imagination. But the Odyssey was undervalued, almost despised, in the land of its birth, while the Iliad was the great national epic; and for this reason chiefly, that the latter was the story of arms and battles, the former, of inglorious disappointments, wanderings, and shipwrecks.

Conquered Greece was still the home of art and science, provincial Athens was still the literary capital of the world; but, when conquered and provincial, no longer honored. The Romans, who borrowed thence all their art and learning, and much of whose choicest literature is only free translation from the Greek, despised the Greeks as a mere nation of scholars, and hardly deigned to speak of them except as Græculi. Rome, indeed, was the most purely and entirely military state of which we have any record. Its brief intervals of peace were but armed truces. It staked its very existence on conquest. Vanquished cities and provinces raised its corn, paid its revenue, fed its populace, clothed its armies. Its most honored men were skilful and successful military leaders; and their civic virtues, when enumerated by Roman historians, are simply sketched as a background for the warrior's portrait. The kings, and afterwards the consuls, were supreme commanders in war, and, with rare exceptions, were elevated to office for their high military endowments; and when the republic fell, the title attached to the purple and the throne was not that of simple royalty, but, what was

deemed an infinitely higher object of ambition, Imperator,the degree which, in the days of the republic, had been conferred on eminent generals after distinguished victories. The magnificent historians, the renowned poets of Rome, were mere hangers-on in the train of honored military leaders or sovereigns, and sought not the world-embracing glory that they have found, but merely tolerance as eulogists and flatterers of a prowess which they could only praise without emulating. Cicero (who perhaps was deficient in that personal courage which with the Romans was the soul of virtue, and whose military career, though reputable, failed of the honors of a triumph, and won him no durable fame), unaware that his philosophy and eloquence would do more for his name with posterity than a thousand conquered cities, labored on no point so perseveringly and strenuously as in the endeavour to convince his fellow-citizens that his unarmed defeat of Catiline's conspiracy was virtually a high military achievement, entitling him to a place among the laurelled commanders of the republic. His dragging in of this topic on occasions the most irrelevant, his reiteration of it with the most indelicate egotism, show conclusively that he regarded military fame as alone worthy and immortal.

The northern nations that overran the Roman empire had the same standard of glory. Nay, among some of them, it was deemed infamous to die a natural death by the act of God; so that the surviving leader of a hundred battles, when he found himself sinking by nature's kind decay, carved the characters of his rude war-song with his own sword in his own veins, and shed in suicide the blood which his enemies had spared.

These nations transmitted their spirit to the new European states that sprang from the dissolution of the western empire, in none of which could a pacific monarch keep his throne, or an unwarlike subject win an honored place. From the nations thus formed came the institutions of chivalry, designed and adapted solely to cherish and reward military skill and prowess, which gave their type to the whole of the Middle Ages. There was no title or office to which the knight might not aspire, by virtue of his science or success in arms. Monarchs were not complete in dignity, till the honors of knighthood had decked the sceptre. In every European kingdom, the noble once knighted was his monarch's peer;