s art."

Tasso also was the victim of almost continual persecution and calumny.
After lying in a madhouse for seven years, he became a wanderer over
Italy; and when on his deathbed, he wrote: "I will not complain of
the malignity of fortune, because I do not choose to speak of the
ingratitude of men who have succeeded in dragging me to the tomb of a
mendicant."

But Time brings about strange revenges. The persecutors and the
persecuted often change places; it is the latter who are great--the
former who are infamous. Even the names of the persecutors would
probably long ago have been forgotten, but for their connection with the
history of the men whom they have persecuted. Thus, who would now have
known of Duke Alfonso of Ferrara, but for his imprisonment of Tasso? Or,
who would have heard of the existence of the Grand Duke of Wurtemburg of
some ninety years back, but for his petty persecution of Schiller?

Science also has had its martyrs, who have fought their way to light
through difficulty, persecution, and suffering. We need not refer again
to the cases of Bruno, Galileo, and others, [216] persecuted because
of the supposed heterodoxy of their views. But there have been other
unfortunates amongst men of science, whose genius has been unable to
save them from the fury of their enemies. Thus Bailly, the celebrated
French astronomer [21who had been mayor of Paris], and Lavoisier, the
great chemist, were both guillotined in the first French Revolution.
When the latter, after being sentenced to death by the Commune, asked
for a few days' respite, to enable him to ascertain the result of some
experiments he had made during his confinement, the tribunal refused
his appeal, and ordered him for immediate execution--one of the judges
saying, that "the Republic had no need of philosophers." In England
also, about the same time, Dr. Priestley, the father of modern
chemistry, had his house burnt over his head, and his library destroyed,
amidst shouts of "No philosophers!" and he fled from his native country
to lay his bones in a foreign land.

The work of some of the greatest discoverers has been done in the midst
of persecution, difficulty, and suffering. Columbus, who discovered
the New World and gave it as a heritage to the Old, was in his lifetime
persecuted, maligned, and plundered by those whom he had enriched. Mungo
Park's drowning agony in the African river he had discovered, but which
he was not to live to describe;