Who could that strapping young fellow, who passed the door just now, be going to see? Mary Brand: Mary Brand. And who can Big Pete Herring be dressing that silver fox-skin so carefully for? For whom but Mary Brand? And who is it that jokes, and laughs, and dances with all the 'boys' but him; and why?
Who but Mary Brand: and because the love-sick booby carefully avoids her.
LOMBARDY AND THE ITALIAN WAR.
To what is the difference of national character due? Is it to climate? Is the Negro a barbarian by a law of nature? Do his fiery sunshine and his luxuriant soil, his magnificent forest shades, or his mighty rivers, hiding their heads in inaccessible solitudes, and winding for thousands of miles through fields of the plantain and the sugar-cane, condemn him to perpetual inferiority of intellect? Was the brilliancy of the ancient Greek only an emanation from the land of bright skies and balmy airs?—was it the spirit of the sounding cataracts, and the impulse of the vine-covered hills? Was the northern tempest the creator of the northern character? and the perpetual dash of the ocean on the Scandinavian shore, or the roar of the thunder and the sweep of the whirlwind over the Tartar steppe, the training of the tribes which burst in upon the iron frontier of the Great Empire, and left it clay?
The controversy has never yet been settled. Yet, on the whole, we are strongly inclined to think that the mightier impression is due to the operation of man on the mind of man. To our idea, "the globe, with all that it inherits," is but a vast school-room, with its scholars. The nations may enter with different propensities and capacities, but the purpose of the discipline is, to train all in the use of their original powers, to modify the rougher faculties, to invigorate the weaker; and perhaps, in some remoter period of the world and its completion, to educate a universal mind for the duties of a universal family.
What education is to the individual, institutions are to the nation. Why was it that the ancient Roman was the conqueror, the legislator, the man of stern determination, and the example of patriot virtue? Why was he the man of an ambition to be satisfied with nothing narrower than the supremacy of the globe—the defier of the desert, the master of the ocean, the ruler of all the diadems of all mankind?
Yet what is the contrast in the history of his successors,—millions living under the same sky, with the same landscape of hill and dale before them—even with the bold recollections of their ancestry to inspire them, and with frames as athletic, and intellects as vivid as those of the days when every nation brought tribute to the feet of the Cæsars? Why is it that the man of Thermopylæ and Platæa has now no representative but the "cunning Greek," and the land, once covered with trophies, is now only the soil of the trafficker and the tomb? Why has even our own island, so memorable and so admirable, exhibited a contrast to the early terrors and capricious bravery of the Briton in the time of the Roman? For the charioteers and spearmen who fought Cæsar on the shore were chiefly foreigners from Gaul and Germany, defending their own beeves and merchandise, while the natives fled into the forest, and submitted, wherever they were pursued. Why was Russia, for a thousand years, the constant prey of the "riders of the wilderness," who now offer so feeble a resistance to her firm sovereignty? Or, to come to the immediate instance, why have the fiercest tribe of Scandinavia, perhaps the most warlike of mankind in their day, sunk into the feeble flexibility of the Italian, in whom resistance is scarcely more than the work of exasperation, and the boldest hostilities probably deserve no more than the name of a paroxysm?
The name of the Lombards was famous as far back as the sixth century and the reign of Justinian. The camp of Attila had collected the chieftains of the barbarian tribes on the northern bank of the Danube, and his death had left them to divide the vast inheritance which had been won in the briefest period, and by the most remorseless slaughter, in the memory of the world. Hungary and Transylvania were seized by the roving warriors of the Gepidæ. The fears or the policy of Justinian contracted the boundaries of the empire; and whether despising the power, or relying on the indolence, of the barbarians, he stripped the southern bank of its garrisons, for the defence of Italy. The Gepidæ were instantly in arms, the river was crossed in contempt or defiance of the imperial revenge; and this daring act was not less daringly followed by a message to Constantinople, that "as the emperor possessed territories more than he knew how to govern, or could desire to retain, his faithful allies merely anticipated his bounty in taking their share." The emperor suffered the insult in silence, but resolved on revenge. With the artificial policy which always increases the evils of an unprepared government, he invited a new race of barbarians to act as the antagonists of the invader.