[80] Ibid., XIV, 317.
[81] Mr. Gladstone, that enthusiastic student of Homer and of
“Immortal Greece, dear land of glorious lays,”
in his preface to Dr. Schliemann’s notable work on Mycenæ does not hesitate to declare: “There is no preliminary bar to our entertaining the capital question whether the tombs now unearthed and the remains exposed to view are the tombs and remains of the great Agamemnon or his compeers who have enjoyed through the agency of Homer such a protracted longevity of renown.... The conjecture is that these may very well be the tombs of Agamemnon and his company.”
Dr. Schliemann, writing on the same subject, tells us: “I have never doubted that a King of Mycenæ, by name Agamemnon, his charioteer Eurymedon, a princess Cassandra and their followers were treacherously murdered either by Ægisthus at a banquet, ‘like an ox at the manger,’ as Homer says, or in the bath by Clytemnestra, as the later tragic poets represent; and I firmly believed that the murdered persons had been interred in the Acropolis” of Mycenæ.... “My firm faith in the traditions made me undertake my late excavations in the Acropolis and led to the discovery of the five tombs with their immense treasures.” Mycenæ; a Narrative of Researches and Discoveries at Mycenæ and Tyryns, pp. 334, 335 (London, 1878).
[82] Plinii Epistulae No. 97. “Nequi enim dubitabam, qualecumque esset quod faterentur, pertinaciam certe et inflexibilem obstinationem debere puniri.”
[83] The Koran: Commonly called the Alcoran of Mohammed, p. I (Philadelphia, 1870).
[84] The reason why the Ottoman whose home is on the West of the Bosphorus desires to be buried in the cemetery of Scutaria is that “he considers himself a stranger and a sojourner in Europe and the Moslem of Constantinople turns his last lingering look to this Asiatic cemetery where his remains will not be disturbed when the Giaour regains possession of this European city, an event which he is firmly convinced will sometime come to pass. Thus the dying Turk feels a yearning for his native soil; like Joseph in the land of Egypt he exacts a promise from his people that ‘they would carry his bones hence’ and like Jacob, says ‘bury me in my grave which I have in the land of Canaan.’” Constantinople, p. 13 (by R. Walsh, London, 1836).
[85] Mohammed enjoined his followers to visit graveyards frequently. “Visit graves,” he says, for “of a verity they shall make you think of futurity.” Again, he declares: “Whoso visiteth the graves of his two parents every Friday, or one of the two, he shall be written a pious child, even though he might have been in the world, before that, disobedient to them.”
[86] The world has long admired the noble qualities of heart and mind of Florence Nightingale but admiration for her has been greatly enhanced by the recent publication of certain letters of hers, previously unknown, which she wrote to one of her associates in the care of the sick and wounded soldiers of the Crimean War. I reproduce a part of one of which she addressed to the Mother Superior of a band of Catholic sisters who were her collaborators in the great work of mercy to which she devoted herself with such sublime self-abnegation: