Iago lives, devouring the dust and stinging-this is more appalling." Romeo deprecates a gentler judgment than death as the Prince's doom upon him : "Be merciful; say-death. For exile hath more terror in his look, Much more than death: do not say-banishment." Infuriated Antony bids Cleopatra begone, and adds, ""Tis well thou'rt gone, if it be well to live but better 'twere thou fell'st into my fury." "A present death had been more merciful" as Antigonus murmurs, when complying with the behest of Leontes touching the fate of Perdita. Old John of Gaunt desiderates death as soon as life is for him bereft of what makes it endurable: (6 Convey me to my bed, then to my grave: Love they to live, that love and honour have." It is a fond father that exclaims over a swooning daughter, whom he cannot welcome back to life, "Do not live, Hero; do not ope thine eyes; For did I think thou would'st not quickly die, Thought I thy spirits were stronger than thy shames, Strike at thy life." Weep not for the dead, neither bemoan him, said the prophet; but weep sore for him that goeth away. "And death shall be chosen rather than life by all the residue that remain of this evil family." For, happier, to my mind, was he that died. Gibbon writes of that unhappy Tatian whose cruel judges compelled him to gaze on the execution of his son, that the fatal cord was fastened round his own neck "but in the moment when he expected, and perhaps desired, the relief of a speedy death, he was permitted to consume the miserable remnant of his old age in poverty and exile." That Sigismond of Burgundy, who is a canonized saint and martyr, having shed the blood of his innocent son, and then discovered his error, and bewailed the irreparable loss, was sternly checked in his lamentations by an outspoken attendant: "It is not his lot, O King! it is thine which calls for commiseration." Happier he that died. "For the early dead we may bow the head, And strike the breast, and weep; But, oh, what shall be said For the living sorrow? For the living sorrow our grief Dumb grief-draws no relief For the living sorrow That heaps to-morrow upon to-morrow In piled-up pain, beyond Hope's reach!" "And," The Athenians, after the dreadful defeat at Syracuse, were "Wretch that I am! what farther fates attend Happy, thrice happy, who, in battle slain, Press'd, in Atrides' cause, the Trojan plain !" Shakspeare's Talbot, retreating with his forces, before the Pucelle, envies Salisbury his death : "O would I were to die with Salisbury! The shame hereof will make me hide my head." So York, in King Richard II., borne down by a tide of woes : "I would to God, the king had cut my head off with my brother's." Ah! trop cruel Arbate, à quoi m'exposezvous? is the upbraiding remonstrance of Racine's Monimie, when Arbate dashes the poison from her lips, and bids her, while Mithridate is dying, Vives! Compare the style of Tullia, in Howard Payne's Brutus: I'll not taste food, though immortality Were grafted to each atom." With scorn indescribable, with inexpressible loathing and contempt, is that wretched petitioner for the poor boon of existence, the pusillanimous Morris in Rob Roy, regarded by Helen MacGregor. "I could have bid you live," she said, "had life been to you the same weary and wasting burden that it is to me." In Rome's first Slave War, when the last stronghold of Eunus and his followers was attacked, Cleon of Agrigentum chose a soldier's death, and, sallying forth with all who breathed the same spirit as himself, he died fighting valiantly. Eunus escaped for the moment, but was afterwards taken in a cave. "He showed a pusillanimity far unlike the desperate courage of the rest "—the greater part of whom slew one another, and his end was, to be eaten by vermin in a dungeon at Murgantia. Such was the state of the holders out of Jerusalem against Vespasian_in_A.D. 68, that the survivors envied the dead as released from suffering; those who were tormented in prison even thought them happy whose bodies were lying unburied in the streets. We are told of the disastrous close of the French expedition in the Children's Crusade, that seven ships were dashed to pieces by a storm off the Sardinian coast, and sunk with all their crews of at least 1,000 children. "Happier, however, were those who thus perished than the 4,000 who survived to a life of shame and sorrow," sold to the Mahometans for that very purpose. "Farre better I it deeme to die with speed Than waste in woe and waylfull miserie : Sad life worse than glad death." Michelet says of Philippe de Valois' son, King Jean, that he took for his model the blind John of Bohemia, who fought, fastened to his horse, at Crécy: "But he had not the happiness to be killed, like John of Bohemia." Often quoted is dying Bayard's answer to Bourbon's expression of pity: "It is not I who am to be pitied, for I die fighting for king and country: it is you who are to be pitied, for you fight against them." All too many times it hath happened, as Jeremy Taylor laments, that persons of a fair life and a clear reputation have lived to see both impeached and impaired, so that all the world says, "better had it been this man had died sooner." Well might Mary Stuart say with tears to Randolph, that "she perceived now they were not the happiest that lived the longest." In her Narrative of the first French Revolution, Mrs. Elliott infers that had the Court arrested and put to death the Duke of Orleans and some twenty others, the Revolution might have been suppressed, and in that case, she writes, "I should now dare to regret my poor friend the Duke, who, instead of dying thus regretted, lived to be despised and execrated," and to perish on a scaffold after all. Bolingbroke says of one who might fall a victim to power, but with whom would fall truth and reason, and the cause of liberty, "And he, who is buried in their ruins, is happier than he who survives them." "He would leave the world with more honour than they who would remain in it." Of frequent applicability in history are the lines in Southey's Madoc : "Lament not him whom death may save from guilt; For all too surely in the conqueror Thou wilt find one whom his own fears henceforth Must make to all his kin a perilous foe," "Yes, happier they and a heautontimoroumenos to himself. who on the bloody field Stretch when their toil is done," muses a burdened spirit in Maturin's Bertram. The speaker is a female one; and her mood is not so very far away from that of Rowe's Calista, when that Fair Penitent exclaims, unawed by sentence of death, "That I must die, it is my only comfort." Wordsworth apostrophizes a bereaved mother with a reference, designed to be consolatory by suggestive contrast, to the less happy doom of a once equally innocent child, who 66 may now have lived till he could look With envy on thy nameless babe that sleeps Beside the mountain chapel, undisturb'd." For, as a sister songster, or songstress, asks: Are they indeed the bitterest tears we shed, Can our thoughts image forth no darker doom Than that which wraps us in the peaceful tomb?" And then the tale follows-the old, old tale, so often told -of a blighted existence; of one whose life is one dark, fatal, deep eclipse. Lead her to the green grave where ye have laid Should make her sin, and pray to heav'n to die." To have brought back her good name to Little Em'ly, the wretched Martha protests she would have died, and more. "To have died, would not have been much-what can I say?—I would have lived . . . . Lived to be old, in the wretched strects, and to wander about, avoided, in the dark . . . I would have done even that, to save her!" Polly Oliver, in The Rock Ahead, crying hard over her dying boy, is told by Squire Challoner, who speaks feelingly, as one that has felt, and that knows,-"You won't believe me, Mrs. Oliver, and it would be hard to expect you should; but there are worse things in life than seeing your boy die." And then he goes away. He has seen a son of his degraded and debased. We may recall and apply the stances of Malherbe : "Le peu qu'ils ont vécu leur fut grand avantage, What is the doom of Lord Lytton's Lucretia, enforced |