Miscellaneous Essays | Page 7

I shall now be
obliged to leap over all murders, sacred and profane, as utterly
unworthy of notice, until long after the Christian era. Greece, even in
the age of Pericles, produced no murder of the slightest merit; and
Rome had too little originality of genius in any of the arts to succeed,
where her model failed her. In fact, the Latin language sinks under the

very idea of murder. "The man was murdered;"--how will this sound in
Latin? _Interfectus est, interemptus est_--which simply expresses a
homicide; and hence the Christian Latinity of the middle ages was
obliged to introduce a new word, such as the feebleness of classic
conceptions never ascended to. Murdratus est, says the sublimer dialect
of Gothic ages. Meantime, the Jewish, school of murder kept alive
whatever was yet known in the art, and gradually transferred it to the
Western World. Indeed the Jewish school was always respectable, even
in the dark ages, as the case of Hugh of Lincoln shows, which was
honored with the approbation of Chaucer, on occasion of another
performance from the same school, which he puts into the mouth of the
Lady Abbess.
Recurring, however, for one moment to classical antiquity, I cannot but
think that Catiline, Clodius, and some of that coterie, would have made
first-rate artists; and it is on all accounts to be regretted, that the
priggism of Cicero robbed his country of the only chance she had for
distinction in this line. As the subject of a murder, no person could
have answered better than himself. Lord! how he would have howled
with panic, if he had heard Cethegus under his bed. It would have been
truly diverting to have listened to him; and satisfied I am, gentlemen,
that he would have preferred the utile of creeping into a closet, or even
into a cloaca, to the honestum of facing the bold artist.
To come now to the dark ages--(by which we, that speak with precision,
mean, par excellence, the tenth century, and the times immediately
before and after)--these ages ought naturally to be favorable to the art
of murder, as they were to church architecture, to stained glass, &c.;
and, accordingly, about the latter end of this period, there arose a great
character in our art, I mean the Old Man of the Mountains. He was a
shining light, indeed, and I need not tell you, that the very word
"assassin" is deduced from him. So keen an amateur was he, that on
one occasion, when his own life was attempted by a favorite assassin,
he was so much pleased with the talent shown, that notwithstanding the
failure of the artist, he created him a duke upon the spot, with
remainder to the female line, and settled a pension on him for three
lives. Assassination is a branch of the art which demands a separate
notice; and I shall devote an entire lecture to it. Meantime, I shall only
observe how odd it is, that this branch of the art has flourished by fits.

It never rains, but it pours. Our own age can boast of some fine
specimens; and, about two centuries ago, there was a most brilliant
constellation of murders in this class. I need hardly say, that I allude
especially to those five splendid works,--the assassinations of William I,
of Orange, of Henry IV., of France, of the Duke of Buckingham,
(which you will find excellently described in the letters published by
Mr. Ellis, of the British Museum,) of Gustavus Adolphus, and of
Wallenstein. The King of Sweden's assassination, by the by, is doubted
by many writers, Harte amongst others; but they are wrong. He was
murdered; and I consider his murder unique in its excellence; for he
was murdered at noon-day, and on the field of battle,--a feature of
original conception, which occurs in no other work of art that I
remember. Indeed, all of these assassinations may be studied with
profit by the advanced connoisseur. They are all of them exemplaria, of
which one may say,--
Nociurnâ versatâ manu, versate diurne;
Especially _nocturnâ_.
In these assassinations of princes and statesmen, there is nothing to
excite our wonder; important changes often depend on their deaths; and,
from the eminence on which they stand, they are peculiarly exposed to
the aim of every artist who happens to be possessed by the craving for
scenical effect. But there is another class of assassinations, which has
prevailed from an early period of the seventeenth century, that really
does surprise me; I mean the assassination of philosophers. For,
gentlemen, it is a fact, that every philosopher of eminence for the two
last centuries has either been murdered, or, at the least, been very near
it; insomuch, that if a man calls himself a philosopher, and never had
his