"Ye Christian Bondous who of feeling boast!"
Unable in the whole range of my vernacular, to find an epithet sufficiently expressive to enunciate the aggravated contempt which all feel for that pseudonymous class of philanthropists, who flauntingly parade a pompous sympathy with popular and distant distresses, but studiously cultivate a coarse ignorance of, and hauteur to, the Greeks, which "are at the door," I have had recource to the Metonymy, Bondou, as rendered mournfully significant through the melancholy fate of the illustrious Houghton.—Vide Report African Discovery Society.
"Contemn a Marius' or a Scylla's ire."
Napoleon in his protest to Lord Bathurst, provoked by the petty tyranny of Sir Hudson Lowe, said of the "Proscriptions," and (by negative inference) in extenuation of them, that they "were made with the blood yet fresh upon the sword." A sentence, which, falling from the lips of one of the most imperturbably cool and calculating of mankind, under circumstances superinducing peculiar reflection on every word uttered, cannot but come with the force of a whole volume of excoriative evidence against the demoralization of war, even upon the most abstracted and elevated natures.—Vide Letters of Montholon and Las Cases.
"Weep o'er an Agis' or Jugurtha's fate."
Agis, King of Lacedemon and colleague of Leonidas, was a youth of singular purity and promise. Aiming to correct the abuses which had crept into the Spartan polity, he introduced regenerative laws. Among others, one for the equalization of property, and as an example of disinterested liberality, shared his estate with the community. Unappreciated by the degenerated Senate however, he was deposed, and, with his whole family, strangled by order of the ingrate State.—Edin. Encyc.
It is said that when Jugurtha was led before the ear of the conquerer, he lost his senses. After the triumph he was thrown into prison, where, whilst they were in haste to strip him, some tore his robes off his back, and others, catching eagerly at his pendants, pulled off the tips of his ears with them. When he was thrust down naked into the dungeon, all wild and confused, he said, with a frantic smile, "Heavens! how cold is this bath of yours!" There struggling for six days with starvation, and to the last hour laboring for the preservation of his life, he came to his end.—Plut. Cai. Mar.