that we are apt to dislike those whom we have wronged, and thus preposterously to visit upon them the sins of our own injustice. Familiar, or cheerful, or affectionate intercourse with those who have been wronged, is truly said to be generally out of the question; and the closer the intercourse, the less easily is it restored. "To forgive artistically," in the words of an essayist on social subjects, parents or friends ought to go so far as not merely to pass over, but to ignore what has been done. But even if they can bring themselves to this "gentle hypocrisy," the difficulty will not have disappeared,-"for those who are the wrong-doers will probably have a more tenacious memory, and not be easily ready to do the same."

Gibbon owed many things, both in matter and manner, or mannerism, to Tacitus; and the famous apophthegm of the Roman historian is again and again illustrated by the historian of Rome, Proprium humani generis est odisse quem læseris. Thus, in describing the murder of Para, king of Armenia, in the fourth century of our era, Gibbon writes: "After his return to his native kingdom, Para still continued to profess himself the friend and ally of the Romans; but the Romans had injured him too deeply ever to forgive, and the secret sentence of his death was signed in the council of Valens." So in the instance of Arcadius and his too powerful minister, Rufinus: "The emperor would soon be instructed to hate, to fear, and to destroy, the powerful subjects whom he had injured." And once again in the case of Genseric and the nobility of Carthage: "It was natural enough that Genseric should hate those whom he had injured." Cleomenes, says one historian of Athens, chafed at the failure of his attempt on the Athenian liberties, "conceived, in the true spirit of injustice, that he had been rather the aggrieved than the aggressor," and feeding up a cordial dislike to those he had wronged, set to work to wrong them anew, and with better success this time.

When Thomas Moore, in his Life of Byron, comes to treat of the mysterious feud that separated husband and wife in 1816, he remarks that if there be any truth in the principle that they never pardon who have done the wrong," Lord Byron, who

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was, to the last, disposed to conciliation, proved so far, at least, his conscience to have been unhaunted by any very disturbing consciousness of aggression. It is observable that Byron himself cites the adage, in a letter he wrote to his wife seven years later, one paragraph in which closes thus: "I assure you that I bear you now (whatever I may have done) no resentment whatever. Remember that, if you have injured me in aught, this forgiveness is something; and that, if I have injured you, it is something more still, if it is true, as the moralists say, that the most offending are the least forgiving."

Lucius Mason, in Orley Farm, no sooner finds that the property he has been enjoying has rightfully belonged all the time to another, than he begins to wax wroth with that other whom he has thus and for so long a time, however involuntarily, wronged. "His head, he said to himself, should never again rest under a roof which belonged of right to Joseph Mason. He had injured Joseph Mason-had injured him innocently, indeed, as far as he himself was concerned-but he had injured him greatly, and therefore now hated him all the more."

La Bruyère, in his pithy way, enunciates the double-faced or two-eyed proposition, with its negative pole, so to speak-that we violently hate those whom we have deeply offended, just as we foster a growing regard for those to whom we have done a kindness. "Comme nous nous affectionnons de plus en plus aux personnes à qui nous faisons de bien, de même nous haïssons violemment ceux que nous avons beaucoup offensés."

There came a crisis in the relations of the Emperor Domitian with Agricola, when the prince plainly intimated to the general that he dared not again employ him; and Agricola is said to have discreetly refrained from soliciting employment. If he was named for an important government, it was, says Dean Merivale, with the understanding that he should himself decline it; but the emperor took what was deemed a base advantage of his moderation, in withholding the salary of the office, which, it seems, ought in fairness to have been pressed upon him. "Domitian knew that he had now openly mortified

a gallant and popular officer, and he began to hate the man he had injured: such, as Tacitus reminds us, is a common infirmity of our nature. But Domitian's temper, he adds, was prone to take offence, and the more he dissembled, the more was he implacable."

Sir Charles Grandison, in his stately, sonorous way, apprises a clerical correspondent, "I have more than once, Dr. Bartlett, experienced the irreconcileable enmity of a man whom I have forgiven for a meanness, and who was less able to forgive me my forgiveness than I was him his fault." And as with Richardson, so with Fielding, the theme is once and again a topic for illustration. Booth's friend, the colonel, is described as eager in quest of any the shallowest reason for hating the man whom he could not help hating without any reason—at least, without any which he durst fairly assign even to himself. And Mrs. Bennet, in the same story, relating her step-mother's success in setting her father against her, and making him use her ill, declares her to have been unable so perfectly to subdue his understanding as to prevent him from being conscious of such illusage; and from this consciousness," she goes on to say, "he began inveterately to hate me. Of this hatred he gave me numberless instances; and I protest to you, I know not any other reason for it than what I have assigned, and the cause, as experience hath convinced me, is adequate to the effect." Rousseau was quite of the same mind when he emphatically asserted, as the alleged result of manifold experience on his part, that "la haine des méchants ne fait que s'animer davantage par l'impossibilité de trouver sur quoi la fonder; et le sentiment de leur injustice n'est qu'un grief de plus contre celui qui en est l'objet." In another of his autobiographical works, where he is expatiating after his peculiar and peculiarly aggrieved manner on the rancour of his alleged foes, all and sundry-he says of the doctors, to whom he had given cause of offence, that possibly they might become reconciled to him, but that as for the oratoriens, whom he had loved, in whom he had reposed confidence, and whom he had never offendedthey, he was persuaded, would for ever be implacably hostile to

him: "Leur propre iniquité fait mon crime, que leur amourpropre ne me pardonnera jamais."

Beattie says in one of his letters that Lord Monboddo had never pardoned him for calling Captain Cook a philosopher, and probably never would; but what made the doctor hopeless of regaining the judge's goodwill was the odisse quem læseris maxim; for, he adds, "I think he did not use me quite well in the preface to his Metaphysic, and when a man uses you ill, he seldom fails to hate you for it." Swift introduces the truism in his Modest Inquiry into the Report of the Queen's Death. It is a common observation, he says, "that the offended party often forgives; but the offending party seldom. It is one of the corrupt sentiments of the heart of man to hate one the more for having used them ill; and to wish those out of the way who, we believe, ought in justice to revenge the injuries we have done them." In this last particular may be descried an efficient reason, in cases not a few, for the cherished hatred observable in the wrong-doer. Fear and apprehension keep him uneasy, and the object of his uneasiness is increasingly the object of his dislike.* Again, in the Dean's History of the Four Last (or should it be Last Four?) Years of Queen Anne, he gives this finishing touch to his portrait of the Earl of Sunderland: "The sense of the injuries he has done, renders him (as it is very natural) implacable towards those to whom he has given greatest cause to complain; for which reason he will never forgive either the queen or the present treasurer."

As Charles Fox is said to have never forgiven George IV. the falsehood which duped him into denying in the House the Fitzherbert marriage, so is it said of His Majesty that he too, on his part, could never prevail upon himself to forgive Mr. Fox for having so much to pardon.

* It has been wittily said of continental hotel keepers and lodging-house keepers, in whose bosoms the fleecing to which they have subjected you in bygone years stirs up hospitable emotions as often as you visit them again, that of them the old saying of odisse quem læsers is most emphatically untrue; for the more they have been able to injure you, the less do they hate you.

XIII.

THE CAVE OF ADULLAM.

I SAMUEL Xxii. 2.

'OR fear of Saul, fled David to Achish, king of Gath; and

FOR

for fear of Achish he hied him to the cave of Adullam. In the cave he found a refuge, and to the cave there came other refugees, a mixed multitude, more imposing in numbers than credit. For, "every one that was in distress, and every one that was in debt, and every one that was discontented [or bitter of soul], gathered themselves unto him; and he became a captain over them: and there were with him about four hundred men." The character of the confederates would scarcely seem to have ranked much above that of the adventurers who, in like manner, once associated themselves to Jephthah, when that mighty man of valour, the outcast Gileadite, fled from his brethren, and dwelt in the land of Tob; and there were gathered vain men to Jephthah, and went out with him.

Once accepted as authentic history was the record of Romulus issuing a proclamation with a view to the peopling of his new city, declaring it to be an "asylum," a sanctuary and place of safety, for such as were banished from the other cities of Italy; a device which brought to him many who had quitted their respective towns, whether for debt, or on account of crimes by them committed.* And Chesterfield, in one of his

* Spartacus in revolt was presently joined by slaves and outlaws of all descriptions: he has the credit, however, of having enforced strict discipline, and so long as he was able, obliged his lawless followers to abstain from acts of violence and rapine. But discipline failed anon; and as incidental evidence of the extent of the ravages committed in central and southern Italy by the rude bands under his command, historians refer to the wellknown line of Horace, in which the poet promised his friend a jar of wine made during the Social War, if he could find one that had “escaped the clutches of roaming Spartacus."

On Cæsar's side, against Pompey, were ranged "all the criminal and obnoxious," as the most elaborate and old-fashioned of our biographers of Cicero words it, following the wording of Cicero himself; "all who had