My lords, you are all impatient for the sacrifice. The blood which you seek is not congealed by the artificial terrors which surround your victim; it circulates warmly and unruffled through the channels which God created for noble purposes, but which you are bent to destroy for purposes so grievous that they cry to heaven! Be yet patient! I have but a few words more to say. I am going to my silent grave; my lamp of life is nearly extinguished; my race is run; the grave opens to receive me, and I sink into its bosom. I have but one request to ask at my departure from this world—it is the charity of its silence. Let no man write my epitaph; for, as no one who knows my motives dare now vindicate them, let not prejudice or ignorance asperse them. Let them and me repose in obscurity and peace, and my tomb remain uninscribed, until other times, and other men, can do justice to my character. When my country shall take her place among the nations of the earth, then, and not till then, let my epitaph be written! I have done.
Mortality. It takes twenty months to bring man from the state of embryo, and from that of a mere animal, as he is in his first infancy, to the point when his reason begins to dawn. It has taken thirty centuries to know his structure; it would take an eternity to know something of his soul: it takes but an instant to kill him.—Voltaire.
The Rivals.
By BENSON J. LOSSING.
The late historian, Benson J. Lossing, whose name for a large part of the last century was connected with historical authorship and with wood engraving, was born in Dutchess County, New York, February 12, 1813, and died June 3, 1891. When a very young man he became editor of a local paper in Poughkeepsie, and, afterward, with Barritt, under the familiar signature of "Lossing and Barritt," did a very large amount of the wood engraving current a generation or more ago.
Inspired by his editorial and art experience, he began early to visit the places made notable by the battles and memorable scenes of the Revolutionary War. Of buildings connected therewith, or of their falling ruins, he made sketches. Out of this activity came his famous and still excellent work, "The Field Book of the Revolution." The history of our subsequent wars he also treated; and it was history chiefly that engaged his pen. The one exception was his publication of the Casket, in 1836 or thereabouts, which in a form similar to that of the Nation, was a very creditable literary and family magazine, conducted in a popular way, when magazines in this country were few and unimportant. One does not find, in any account of him apart from this venture of possibly not over three years' duration, that he left his purely historical themes.
Very recently, however, The Scrap Book came across a somewhat romantic story, with a touch and climax of art and love in it, which is the product of his pen; though its style is a little more ambitious and florid than the one for which he was noted. It tells, with much liberty of embellishment, the thrilling anecdote of the contest of the Grecian artists, Zeuxis and Parrhasius. As it was interesting sixty years ago, when it appeared (in 1846), doubtless it may have some interest now.
Zeuxis was the pride and boast of Athens. His pencil had no rival, and thrice he had been crowned victor of the Olympic games. The dwellings of the rich and noble, and the shrines and temples of the gods, were decorated with the fruits of his genius. He was courted by the wise and powerful. Artists and magi came from distant cities to look upon the Athenian painter, whose name was sounded worldwide.