y-seven thousand persons, their inhabitants; and of that Attila,
"the scourge of God," who used to say, more especially in reference to
the other country, that "whenever his horse-hoofs had once trod, the
grass never afterwards grew," and before whose ravages the human race
seemed melting away. The terms in which the great wickedness of the
antediluvians is described indicate a period of violence and
outrage;--the age which preceded the Flood was an age of "giants" and of
"mighty men," and of "men of renown,"--forgotten Attilas, Alarics, and
Zingis Khans, mayhap,--"giants of mighty bone and bold emprise," who
became famous for their "infinite manslaughter," and the thousands whom
they destroyed. Such is decidedly the view which the brief Scriptural
description suggested to the poets; and certainly, when a question comes
to be one of guess work, no other class of persons guess half so
sagaciously as they. It has not unfrequently occurred to me,--and in a
question of this kind one suggestion may be quite as admissible as
another,--that the Deluge may have been more a visitation of mercy to
the race than of judgment. Even in our own times, as happened in New
Zealand during the present century, and in Tahiti about the close of the
last, tribes restricted to one tract of country, when seized by the
madness of conquest, have narrowly escaped extermination. We know that
in some instances better have been destroyed by worse races,--that the
more refined have at times yielded to the more barbarous,--yielded so
entirely, that all that survived of vast populations and a comparatively
high civilization have been broken temples, and great burial mounds
locked up in the solitudes of deep forests; and further, that whole
peoples, exhausted by their vices, have sunk into such a state of
depression and decline, that, unable any longer to supply the inevitable
waste of nature, they have dropt into extinction. And such may have been
the condition of the human race during that period of portentous evil
and violence which preceded the deluge. We know that the good came at
length to be restricted to a single family; and even the evil, instead
of being numbered, as now, by hundreds of millions, may have been
comprised in a few thousands, or at most a few hundred thousands, that
were becoming fewer every year, from the indulgence of fierce and evil
passions, in a time of outrage and violence. The Creator of the race may
have dealt with it on thi