champions of his religion." "Thou tellest an impious lie," answered Sergiabil; "Jesus is not greater before God than Adam. God raised him from the dust; he gave life to him as to another man, and, after leaving him for some time on the earth, took him up into heaven." After some more verbal skirmishing, the; fight began. Thomas discharged an arrow, which wounded young Aban, the son of Saib, by the side of the valiant Sergiabil; Aban fell and expired; the news of his ? death reached his young wife, to whom he had been united but a few days before; she neither wept nor complained, but ran { to the field of battle, with a quiver at her back, and a couple of arrows in her hand; with the first of these she killed the Christian standard-bearer; and the Arabs seized the trophy, crying, Allah achar! with the other she shot Thomas in the eye, and he retired, bleeding into the town.

Arabian history is full of similar examples, but they do not tell us that these warlike women burned their right breast, that they might draw the bow better, nor that they lived without men; on the contrary, they exposed themselves in battle for their husbands or their lovers; from which very circumstance we must conclude that, so far from reproaching Ariosto and Tasso for having introduced so many enamoured warriors into their poems, we ought to praise them for having delineated real and interesting manners.

example of greater or more persevering courage in a woman.

She had been preceded by the celebrated Countess De Montfort, in Brittany. "This princess," says D'Argentré," was virtuous beyond the nature of her sex, and valiant beyond all men; she mounted her horse, and managed him better than any esquire; she fought hand to hand, or charged a troop of armed men like the most valiant captain; she fought on sea and land with equal bravery," &c. She went, sword in hand, through her states, which were invaded by her competitor, Charles de Blois. She not only sustained two assaults, armed cap-à-pie, in the breach of Hennebon, but she made a sortie with five hundred men, attacked the enemy's camp, set fire to it, and reduced it to ashes.

The exploits of Joan of Arc, better known as the Maid of Orleans, are less astonishing than those of Margaret of Anjou and the Countess De Montfort. These two princesses having been brought up in the luxury of courts, and Joan of Arc in the rude exercises of country life, it was more singular, as well as more noble, to quit a palace for the field, than a cottage.

The heroine who defended Beauvais was, perhaps, superior to her who raised the siege of Orleans; for she fought quite as well, and neither boasted of being a maid, nor of being inspired. It was in When the crusading mania was at its 1472, when the Burgundian army was height, there were some Christian women besieging Beauvais, that Jeanne Hachette, who shared the fatigues and dangers of at the head of a number of women, sustheir husbands. To such a pitch, indeed, tained an assault for a considerable time, was this enthusiasm carried, that the Ge-wrested the standard from one of the noese women undertook a crusade of their own, and were on the point of setting out for Palestine to form petticoat battalions; they had made a vow so to do, but were? absolved from it by a pope, who was a little wiser than themselves.

enemy who was about to plant it on the breach, threw the bearer into the trench, and gave time for the king's troops to arrive and relieve the town. Her descendants have been exempted from the taille, (poll tax)-a mean and shameful recomMargaret of Anjou, wife to the unfor- pense! The women and girls of Beautunate Henry VI. of England, evinced, vais are more flattered by their walking in a juster war, a valour truly heroic; she before the men in the procession on the fought in ten battles to deliver her hus-anniversary-day. Every public mark of band. History affords no authenticated honour is an encouragement of merit ; but

the exemption from the taille is but a proof that the individuals so exempted were subjected to this servitude by the misfortune of their birth.

Datary has asserted, that he meant he should be master over Charlemagne.

Have not things the most venerablethe most sacred-the most divine, been obscured by the ambiguities of language?

Ask two Christians of what religion they are. Each will answer, I am a Catholic. You think they are both of the same communion; yet one is of the Greek, the other of the Latin church; and they are irreconcileable. If you seek to be further informed, you will find that by the word Catholic, each of them understands universal, in which case universal signifies a part.

There is hardly any nation which does not boast of having produced such heroines: the number of these, however, is not great; nature seems to have designed women for other purposes. Women have been known but rarely to exhibit themselves as soldiers. In short, every people have had their female warriors; but the kingdom of the Amazons, on the banks of the Thermodon, is, like most other ancient stories, nothing more than a poetic fiction. AMBIGUITY-EQUIVOCATION. is in paradise. One of these words signi

For want of defining terms, and especially for want of a clear understanding, almost all laws, which ought to be as plain as arithmetic and geometry, are as obscure as logogriphes. The melancholy proof of this is, that nearly all processes are founded on the sense of the laws, always differently understood by the pleaders, the advocates, and the judges.

The whole public law of Europe had its origin in equivocal expressions, beginning with the Salique law. She shall not? inherit Salique land. But what is Sulique land? And shall not a girl inherit money, or a necklace, left to her, which may be worth more than the land?

The soul of St. Francis is in heaven

fies the air; the other means a garden. The word spirit is used alike to express extract, thought, distilled liquor, apparition.

Ambiguity has been so necessary a vice in all languages, formed by what is called chance and by custom, that the author of all clearness and truth, himself condescended to speak after the manner of his people; whence it is that Elohim signifies in some places judges, at other times gods, and at others angels.

"Tu es Petrus, et super hunc petrum ædificabo ecclesiam meam," would be equivocal in a profane tongue, and on a profane subject; but these words receive a divine sense from the mouth which utters them, and the subject to which they are applied.

The citizens of Rome saluted Karl, son of the Austrasian Pepin le Bref, by the name of imperator. Did they understand thereby, We confer on you all the prerogatives of Octavius, Tiberius, Caligula, and Claudius? We give you all the country which they possessed? However, they could not give it; for so far were they from being masters of it, that they were scarcely masters of their own city. There never was a more equivocal expres-ham, Isaac, and Jacob, likewise bears sion; and such as it was then it still is.

"I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob; now God is not the God of the dead, but of the living." In the ordinary sense, these words might signify, I am the same_God that was worshipped by Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; as the earth, which bore Abra

their descendants; the sun which shines to-day is the sun that shone on Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; the law of their children wus their law. This does not, however, signify that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are still living. But when the Messiah speaks, there is no longer any

ambiguity; the sense is as clear as it is divine. It is evident that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, are not among the dead, but live in glory, since this oracle is pronounced by the Messiah: but it was necessary that he and no one else should utter it.

The discourses of the Jewish prophets might seem equivocal to men of gross intellects, who could not perceive their meaning; but they were not so to minds illumined by the light of faith.

All the oracles of antiquity were equivocal. It was foretold to Croesus that a powerful empire was to fall; but fras it to be his own? or that of Cyrus? It was also foretold to Pyrrhus that the Romans might conquer him, and that he might conquer the Romans. It was impossible that this oracle should lie.

caused men to exist there also. However pleasant it may be to dispute, it cannot be denied that the Supreme Being who lives in all nature, has created, about the forty-eighth degree, two-legged animals without feathers, the colour of whose skin is a mixture of white and carnation, with long beards approaching to red; about the line, in Africa and its islands, negroes without beards; and in the same latitude, other negroes with beards, some of them having wool, and some hair on their heads; and among them other animals quite white, having neither hair nor wool, but a kind of white silk. It does not very clearly appear what should have prevented God from placing on another continent animals of the same species, of a copper colour, in the same latitude in which, in Africa and Asia, they are found black; or even from making them without beards in the very same latitude in which others possess them.

When Septimius Severus, Pescennius Niger, and Clodius Albinus, were contending for the empire, the oracle of Delphos, being consulted (notwithstanding To what lengths are we carried by the the assertion of the Jesuit Baltus, that{rage for systems joined with the tyranny oracles had ceased) answered, that the of prejudice! We see these animals; brown was very good, the white good for it is agreed that God has had the power nothing, and the African tolerable. It is to place them where they are; yet it is plain that there are more ways than one not agreed that he has so placed them. of explaining such an oracle. The same persons who readily admit that When Aurelian consulted the God of the beavers of Canada are of Canadian Palmyra, (still in spite of Baltus), the origin, assert that the men must have God said that the doves fear the falcon. come there in boats, and that Mexico Whatever might happen, the God would must have been peopled by some of the not be embarrassed: the falcon would be descendants of Magog. As well might the conqueror, and the doves the conquered. it be said, that if there be men in the Sovereigns, as well as Gods, have moon, they must have been taken thither sometimes made use of equivocation. by Astolpho on his hippogriff, when he Some tyrant, whose name I forget, hav-went to fetch Roland's senses, which were ing sworn to one of his captives, that he would not kill him, ordered that he should have nothing to eat, saying that he had promised not to put him to death, but he had not promised to keep him alive.

corked up in a bottle. If America had been discovered in his time, and there had then been men in Europe systematic enough to have advanced, with the Jesuit Lafitau, that the Caribbees descended from the inhabitants of Caria, and the Hurons from the Jews, he would have SINCE framers of systems are continu-done well to have brought back the bottle ally conjecturing on the manner in which Ainerica can have been peopled, we will be equally constant in saying that He who caused flies to exist in those regions,

AMERICA.

containing the wits of these reasoners, which he would doubtless have found in the moon, along with those of Angelica's lover.

The first thing done when an inhabited island is discovered in the Indian Ocean, or in the South Seas, is to enquire whence came these people? but as for the trees and the tortoises, they are, without any hesitation, pronounced to be indigenous; as if it was more difficult for Nature to make men than to make tortoises. One thing, however, which tends to countenance this system is, that there is scarcely an island in the Eastern or in the Western Ocean, which does not contain jugglers, quacks, knaves, and fools. This, it is probable, gave rise to the opinion, that these animals are of the same race with ourselves.

AMPLIFICATION.

Ir is pretended that amplification is a fine figure of rhetoric; perhaps, however, it would be more reasonable to call it a defect. In saying all that we ought to say, we do not amplify; and if after saying this we amplify, we say too much. To place a good or bad action in every light, is not to amplify; but to go further than this, is to exaggerate and become weari

some.

If the long description of the reign of Sleep throughout all nature did not form an admirable contrast with the cruel inquietude of Dido, these lines would be no other than a puerile amplification; it is the words At non infelix animi Phanissa-" Unhappy Dido," &c.—which give them their charm.

That beautiful ode of Sappho's which paints all the symptoms of love, and which has been happily translated into every cultivated language, would, doubtless, have been less touching had Sappho been speaking of any other than herself; it might then have been considered as an amplification.

The description of the tempest, in the first book of the Eneid, is not an amplification; it is a true picture of all that happens in a tempest; there is no idea repeated, and repetition is the vice of all which is merely amplification.

The finest part on the stage in any language is that of Phedre (Phædra.) Nearly all that she says would be tiresome amplification, if any other was speaking of Phædra's passion.

Athènes me montra mon superbe ennemi;
Je le vis, je rongis, je pâlis, a sa vue;
Un troubles éleva dans mon ame éperdue;
Mes yeux ne voyaient plus, je ne pouvais parler.
Je sentis tout mon corps et transir et brûler;
Je reconnus Venus et ses traits rédoubtables,
D'un sang qu'elle poursuit tourmens inévitables.

Prizes were formerly given in colleges for amplification. This was indeed teaching the art of being diffuse. It would, perhaps, have been better to have given the fewest words, and thus teach the art of speaking with greater force and energy. Yes;-Athens showed me my proud enemy; But while we avoid amplification, let us beware of dryness.

I have heard professors teach that certain passages in Virgil are amplifications, as for instance the following:

Nox erat, et placidum carpebant fessa soporem
Corpora per terras, silvæque et saeva quièrunt
Equora; quum medio volvuntur sidera lapsu ;
Quùm tacet omnis ager, pecudes, pietaeque volucres;
Quaeque lacus latè liquidos, quaeque aspera dumis
Rura tenent, somno positae sub nocte silenti
Lenibant curas, et corda oblita laborum:
At non infelix animi Phænissa.

'Twas dead of night, when weary bodies close
Their eyes in balmy sleep and soft repose:
The winds no longer whisper through the woods,
Nor murmuring tides disturb the gentle Bloods;
The stars in silent order moved around,

And peace, with downy wings, was brooding on the ground.
The Bocks and herds, and parti-coloured fowl,

Which haunt the woods, and swim the weedy pool,
Stretched on the quiet earth securely lay,

Forgetting the past labours of the day.
All else of Nature's common gift partake;
Unhappy Dido was alone awake.Dryden.

I saw him-blushed-turned pale:

A sudden trouble came upon my soul,-
My eyes grew dim-my tongue refused its office,-
1 burned-and shivered-through my trembling frame
Venus in all her dreadful power I felt,

Shooting through every vein a separate pang.

It is quite clear that, since Athens showed her her proud enemy Hippolytus, she saw Hippolytus; if she blushed and turned pale, she was doubtless troubled. It would have been a pleonasm-a redundancy, if a stranger had been made to relate the loves of Phædra; but it is Phædra, enamoured and ashamed of her passion-her heart is full-everything escapes her ;

Ut vidi, ut perii, ut me malus abstulit error,
Je le vis, je rongis, je pâlis, à sa vue.

I saw him-blushed-turned pale.

What can be a better imitation of Virgil

1

Mes yeux ne voyaient plus, je ne pouvais parler;
Je sentis tout mon corps et transir et brûler;
My eyes grew dim-my tongue refused its office;
I burned and shivered;-

What can be a finer imitation of Sappho? These lines, though imitated, flow as from their first source; each word moves and penetrates the feeling heart: this is not amplification, it is the perfection of nature and of art.

In this description we see the poet wishing to surprise his readers with the relation of a shipwreck, rather than the man who seeks to avenge his father and his friend-to kill the tyrant of Argos, but who is at the same time divided between love and vengeance.

Several men of taste, and among others the author of Telemachus, have The following is, in my opinion, an in- considered the relation of the death of stance of amplification, in a modern trage-Hippolytus, in Racine, as an amplificady, which nevertheless has great beauties. tion: long recitals were the fashion at Tydeus is at the court of Argos; he is in that time. The vanity of actors makes love with a sister of Electra; he laments them wish to be listened to, and it was the fall of his friend Orestes and of his then the custom to indulge them in this father; he is divided betwixt his passion way. The archbishop of Cambray says, for Electra and his desire of vengeance: that Theramenes should not, after Hipwhile in this state of care and perplexity, polytus' catastrophe, have strength to he gives one of his followers a long de- speak so long; that he gives too ample a scription of a tempest, in which he had description of the monster's threatening been shipwrecked some time before. horns, his saffron scules, &c. That he ought to say in broken accents, Hippolytus is dead-a monster has destroyed him -I beheld it.

Tu sais ce qu'en ces heux nous venions entreprendre;
Ta sais que Palamede, avant que de s'y rendre,
Ne voulut point tenter son retour dans Argos,
Qu'il n'eût interrogé l'oracle de Délos.

A de si justes soins on souscrivit sans peine:
Nous partimes, combles des bienfaits de Thyrrène;
Tout nous favorisait; nous voyaguàmes long-tems
Au grede nos désirs, bien plus qu'au gré des vents;
Mais, signalaut bientot toute son inconstance,
La mer en un moment se matine et s'elance;
L'air mugit, le jour furt, nne épaisse vapeur
Couvre d'un voile affreux les vagues en fureur;
La foudre, éclairante seule une nuit si profonde,
A sillons redoublés ouvre le ciel et l'onde,
Et comme un tourbillon, embrassant nos vaisseaux,
Semble en sources de feu bouillouner sur les eaux;
Les vagues quelquefois, nous portant sur leurs cimes,
Nous font rouler aprés sous de vastes abimes,
Ou les éclairs pressés, pénétrans avec nous,
Dans des gouffres de feu semblaient nous plonger tous;
Le pilote effrayé, que la famme environne,
Aux rochers qu'il fuyait lui-même s'abandonne;

A travers les écueils notre vaisseau poussé,
Se brise, et nage entin sur les eaux dispersé.

Thog know st what purpose brought us to these shores;
Thon know'st that Palamed would not attempt
Again to set his foot within these walls
Until he'd questioned Delos' oracle.

To his just care we readily subscribed;

We sailed, and favouring gales at first appeared

To announce a prosperous voyage;

Long time we held our course, and held it rather
As our desires than as the winds impelled;
But the inconstant ocean heaved at last
Its treacherous bosom; howling blasts arose:
The heavens were darkened; vapours black and dense
Spread o'er the furious waves a frightful veil,
Pierced only by the thunderbolts, which clove
The waters and the firmament at once,
And whirling round our ship, in horrid sport
Chased one another o'er the boiling surge;
Now rose we on some watery mountain's summit,
Now with the lightening plunged into a gulph
That seemed to swallow all. Our pilot, struck
Powerless by terror, ceased to steer, and left us
Abandoned to those rocks we dreaded most;
Soon did our vessel dash upon their points,
And swim in scattered fragments on the billows.

I shall not enter on a defence of the threatening horns, &c.; yet this piece of criticism, which has been so often repeated, appears to me to be unjust. You would have Theramenes say nothing more than, Hippolytus is killed--1 saw him die -all is over. This is precisely what he does say;-Hippolyte n'est plus! (Hippolytus is no more!) His father exclaims aloud; and Theramenes, on recovering his senses, says,

J'ai vu des mortels périr le plus aimable.

I have seen the most amiabl: of mortals perish.
and adds this line, so necessary and so
affecting yet so agonizing for Theseus-

Et j'ose dire encore, Seigneur, le moins coupable.
And, Sire, I may truly add, the most innocent.

The gradations are fully observed; each shade is accurately distinguished. The wretched father asks what Godwhat sudden thunder-stroke has deprived him of his son? He has not courage to proceed; he is mute with grief; he awaits the dreadful recital, and the audience await it also. Theramenes must answer: he is asked for particulars; he must give :hem.