t. As he tasted a drop of water, he was
pierced in the mouth with a dart; and his son and nephew, two
beautiful youths were killed in his arms. He lifted his hands to
heaven, they were full of blood, and he uttered a funeral prayer for
the living and the dead.

In a transport of despair his sister issued from the tent, and adjured
the general of the Cufians that he would not suffer Hosein to be
murdered before his eyes; a tear trickled down his venerable beard;
and the boldest of his soldiers fell back on every side as the dying
hero threw himself among them. The remorseless Shamer, a name detested
by the faithful, reproached their cowardice; and the grandson of
Mohammed was slain with three and thirty strokes of lances and swords.
After they had trampled on his body, they carried his head to the
castle of Cufa, and the inhuman Obeidollah struck him on the mouth
with a cane. "Alas!" exclaimed an aged Mussulman, "on these lips have
I seen the lips of the apostle of God!" In a distant age and climate
the tragic scene of the death of Hosein will awaken the sympathy of
the coldest reader. On the annual festival of his martyrdom, in the
devout pilgrimage to his sepulcher, his Persian votaries abandon their
souls to the religious frenzy of sorrow and indignation.

VI

THE CAUSES OF THE DESTRUCTION OF THE CITY OF ROME[77]

In the last days of Pope Eugenius the Fourth, two of his servants, the
learned Poggius[78] and a friend, ascended the Capitoline Hill,
reposed themselves among the ruins of columns and temples, and viewed
from that commanding spot the wide and various prospect of desolation.
The place and the object gave ample scope for moralizing on the
vicissitudes of fortune, which spares neither man nor the proudest of
his works, which buries empires and cities in a common grave; and it
was agreed that in proportion to her former greatness the fall of Rome
was the more awful and deplorable:

"Her primeval state, such as she might appear in a remote age, when
Evander entertained the stranger of Troy, has been delineated by the
fancy of Virgil. This Tarpeian Rock was then a savage and solitary
thicket; in the time of the poet it was crowned with the golden roofs
of a temple; the temple is overthrown, the gold has been pillaged, the
wheel of fortune has accomplished her revolution, and the sacred
ground is again disfigured with thorns and brambles. The hill of the
Capitol, on which we sit, was formerly the hea