ILLUSTRATIONS. PAGE FRONTISPIECE: Luther singing in the Streets of Eisenach Ruins of Balbec Cn. Marcius Coriolanus A Public Place in Rome, with Coriolanus addressing the 1 13 Victory guiding the Car of Alexander 13 A Macedonian Soldier Sir William Wallace, Guardian of Scotland Wallace after the Battle of Stirling The Wartburg . The Siege of Mezières Gustavus Vasa and the Dalecarlians Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey Sir Philip Sidney Funeral of Sir Philip Sidney View of Perth Neapolitan Peasants The " Isabella" and the "Braneas Windsor Castle. Old Houses in the Borough, 1771 48 49 49 61 70 78 86 91 91 101 116 Pompey's Pillar The Infant King of Rome The Simplon 155 165 . 175 The Splugen The Inhospitable Coast Greek Fugitives pursued by Turks Newstead Abbey Kew Palace The Battle of Assaye Dangan Castle Mount Etna Horace Smith Chigwell Grammar School Wordsworth's Grave at Grasmere THE NOBLEST PERSIAN BOY OF OLD. THE ELDER CYRUS. B.C. 560. ONE of the most interesting stories of ancient history is that relating to the boyhood of the elder Cyrus. He was, as all boys ought to know, a celebrated con B queror. He subdued the powerful King Croesus, and Nabonadius king of Babylon, whose capital he took after a siege of two years. He also subdued Phoenicia and Palestine, to which he caused the Jews to return from the Babylonish captivity; while Asia, from the Hellespont to the Indies, was under his dominion. According to Herodotus, Cyrus was the son of Cambyses, a distinguished Persian, and of Mandane, daughter of the Median King Astyages. A short time before his birth, the soothsayers divined, from a dream of the king, that the child about to be born should dethrone him. Astyages therefore gave orders that the poor child should be destroyed at his birth. For this purpose he was put into the hands of the king's chief officer, named Harpagus; but he, willing to shift the sin of so cruel a deed from himself, entrusted the execution of the sentence to a poor herdsman of the king, who, like his employer, could not bear the idea of murdering a poor innocent little child, and brought him up as his own son, and gave him the name of Cyrus. The young prince throve wonderfully upon the coarse fare of the herdsman, and grew up into strength and vigour, far more than he was likely to have done in the effeminate air of a palace. From his earliest years it was his duty to watch the herds and flocks of his foster-father, and more than once did he rescue sheep from the jaws of wolves. On one particular occasion a bear came down among the cattle; |