lago. Why, but you are now well enough: how came you thus recovered? Cas. It has pleased the devil, Drunkenness, to give place to the devil, Wrath; one imperfection shows me another, to make me frankly despise myself. Iago. Come, you are too severe a *moralizer. As the time, the place, and the condition of this country stands, I could heartily wish this had not befallen; but since it is as it is, mend it for your own good. Cas. If I ask him for my place again, he will tell me I am a drunkard! Had I as many mouths as Hydra, such an answer would stop them all. To be now a sensible man, by and by a fool, and presently a beast! Every tinordinate cup is unblessed, and the ingredient is a devil. Iago. Come, come, good wine is a good familiar creature, if it be well used; exclaim no more against it. And, good lieutenant, I think, you think I love you. Cus. I have well approved it, sir. I, drunk! man. Iago. You or any man living, may be drunk at some time, I tell you what you shall do. Our general's wife is now the general. Confess yourself freely to her; +importune her help to put you in your place again. She is of so free, so apt, so kind, so blessed a disposition, she holds it a vice in her goodness not to do more than she is requested. This broken joint between you and her husband, entreat her to splinter; and, my fortunes against any lay worth naming, this crack of your love shall grow stronger than it was before. Cas. You advise me well. Iago. I protest in all the sincerity of love and honest kindness. Cas. I think it freely, and betimes in the morning, I will beseech the virtuous Desdemona to undertake for me. Iago. You are in the right. Good night, lieutenant, I must go to the watch. Cas. Good night, honest Iago. 21 XCI. AN ELEGY ON MADAM BLAIZE 1. Good people all, with one taccord, Who never wanted a good word— 2. The needy seldom pass'd her door, 3. She strove the neighborhood to please, 4. At church, in silks and satins new, 5. Her love was sought, I do aver, 6. But now, her wealth and +finery fled, Her doctors found, when she was dead- 7. Let us lament, in sorrow sore; For Kent-street well may say, That, had she liv'd a twelvemonth more- 1. NOBODY sees a battle. The common soldier fires away amid a smoke-mist, or hurries on to the charge in a crowd, which hides every thing from him. The officer is too anxious about the performance of what he is especially charged with, to mind what others are doing. The com mander can not be present every where, and see every wood, watercourse, or ravine, in which his orders are carried into execution; he learns, from reports, how the work goes on. It is well; for a battle is one of those jobs which men do, without daring to look upon. Over miles of country, at every field-fence, in every gorge of a valley, or entry into a wood, there is murder committing, wholesale, continuous, +reciprocal murder. The human form, God's image, is +mutilated, deformed, +lacerated, in every possible way, and with every variety of torture. The wounded are jolted off in carts to the rear, their bared nerves crushed into maddening pain at every stone or rut; or the flight and pursuit trample over them, leaving them to writhe and groan, without assistance; and fever and thirst, the most enduring of painful *sensations, possess them entirely. 2. Thirst, too, has seized upon the yet able-bodied soldier, who with blood-shot eye and tongue lolling out, *plies his trade; blaspheming; killing, with savage delight; callous, when the brains of his best-loved comrade are spattered over him! The battle-field is, if possible, a more painful object of contemplation than the combatants. They are in their +vocation, earning their bread: what will not men do for a shilling a day? But their work is carried on amid the fields, gardens, and homesteads of men unused to war. They left their homes, with all that habit and happy associations have made precious, to bear its brunt. The poor, the aged, the sick are left in a hurry, to be killed by stray shots or beaten down as the charge or counter-charge go over them. The ripening grain is trampled down: the garden is trodden into a black mud; the fruit-trees, bending beneath their luscious load, are shattered by the cannon-shot; churches and private dwellings are used as fortresses, and ruined in the +conflict; barns and granaries take fire, and the conflagration spreads on all sides. 3. At night, the steed is stabled beside the altar, and the weary homicides of the day complete the wrecking of houses, to make their flairs for slumber. The fires of the +bivouac complete what the fires kindled by the battle have not consumed. The surviving soldiers march on, to act the same scene over again, elsewhere; and the remnant of the scattered inhabitants return, to find the mangled bodies of those they had loved, amid the blackened ruins of their homes; to mourn, with more than agonizing grief, over the missing, of whose fate they are uncertain; to feel themselves bankrupts of the world's stores, and look from their children to the desolate fields and garners, and think of famine and pestilence, engendered by the rotting bodies of the halfburied myriads of slain. 4. The soldier marches on and on, inflicting and suffering, as before. War is a continuance of battles, an epidemic, striding from place to place, more horrible than the typhus, pestilence, or cholera, which, not unfrequently follow in its train. The siege is an aggravation of the battle. The peaceful inhabitants of the +beleaguered town are cooped up, and can not fly the place of conflict. The mutual injuries, inflicted by assailants and assailed, are aggravated; their wrath is more frenzied; then come the storm and the capture, and the riot and excesses of the victor soldiery, striving to quench the drunkenness of blood in the drunkenness of wine. 5. The eccentric movements of war, the marching and counter-marching, often repeat the blow on districts, slowly recovering from the first. Between destruction and the wasteful consumption of the soldiery, poverty pervades the land. Hopeless of the future, hardened by the scenes of which he is a daily witness, perhaps, goaded by revenge, the peasant becomes a plunderer and assassin. The families of the upper classes are dispersed; the discipline of the family circle is removed; a habit of living in the day, for the day, of drowning the morrow in transient and illicit pleasure, is tengendered. The waste and desolation which a battle spreads over the battle-field, is as nothing, when compared with the moral desolation which war diffuses through all ranks of society, in the country which is the scene of war. 1. A MONK, when his rites sacerdotal were o'er, In the depth of his cell with his stone-cover'd floor, 2. Perhaps, it was only by patience and care, At last, that he brought his invention to bear; And, at length, he produced the philosopher's scales. 3 "What were they?" you ask. You shall presently see; These scales were not made to weigh sugar and tea; O no; for such properties wondrous had they, That qualities, feelings, and thoughts, they could weigh; Together with articles small or immense, From mountains or planets, to *atoms of sense. 4. Naught was there so bulky, but there it would lay, 5. The first thing he weigh'd was the head of Voltaire, 6. One time, he put in Alexander the Great, With a garment that Dorcas had made for a weight, 7. A long row of alms-houses, amply tendow'd |