66 WHO HAVE BEEN CALLED "GREAT." AMONG those who have been called " great men," there were some whose claim to that honourable title may fairly be questioned. They were thus distinguished by flatterers or slaves: persons not likely to be duly qualified to judge, concerning either the nature of true greatness, or the real characters and deserts of those to whom they awarded the name of great.' That such persons as these should have bestowed this appellation upon men whose claim thereto rested upon a very scanty (if not, indeed, a very questionable) foundation, was to be expected; and such proved to be the fact. For, if we look at the men thus distinguished, we find that their imputed greatness had no alliance with goodness; while, in many instances, it was flatly opposed to that high and truly-ennobling quality. From hence, may it. not be safely and fairly concluded, that these celebrated men were not great, in the best and truest sense of that word? Yet, it must be admitted that they were, in some respects, great. It was not, however, on account of the benefits they conferred, but rather because of the mischiefs and miseries which they inflicted upon their fellow-creatures. Without provocation of any kind or degree, they made war upon them, until kingdoms were subverted, monarchs deposed, and myriads of human beings slain or grievously maimed in battle, while myriads more were made to suffer all the fearful and accumulated evils which follow in the train of "horrid war." Is it possible, that for such actions as these, any one deserves to be regarded as an honourable man? Do not they who perpetrate such deeds, or who cause them to be perpetrated, deserve to be called robbers and murderers, rather than great heroes? And yet, so easily is the bulk of mankind led astray by the meretricious splendour of what is falsely called glory-especially that of the martial kind-that even the worst of men is adjudged to be worthy of all possible honour and homage if he be but a successful warrior upon a large scale; while men whose names deserve to be familiar as "household words," on account of their philanthropic spirit and beneficent actions, are suffered to remain almost unknown to fame. Leaving these preliminary and general remarks, it will now be well to adduce some examples, first, of men who have been improperly called great; and secondly, of those who might justly have been dignified with that honourable appellation, but from whom it was withheld. First as to those who have been undeservedly called great men. And here the name of Alexander, king of Macedon, occurs as having been among the most famous of the (so-called) great men of antiquity. His claim to this title rests upon the following circumstances: He supplanted the legitimate governments of the Grecian states, and reduced the Greeks to a state of dependence upon Macedon. He carried unprovoked war into numerous kingdoms; wantonly laid waste large districts of those kingdoms; destroyed myriads upon myriads of their unarmed and unoffending inhabitants; and ruined or burnt many magnificent cities, inflicting horrible cruelties upon their population for having dared to defend themselves against his wanton attacks. At last he seemed to have made himself master of nearly all the then known world, but he gave full proof that he had not gained the mastery over his own licentious passions, for to an indulgence in debauchery he owed the loss of his life. At his death, his unwieldy and ill-compacted empire fell into pieces, and then there remained of him nothing but a name, and the vestiges of the mischief and cruelty of which he had been the perpetrator. Let the sober-minded reader decide whether such a being deserved to be called "great." In modern times there has been a King of Prussia, to whom also was wrongly given the same noble title. He is commonly called "Frederic the Great.” As, however, he was a reckless and wholesale destroyer of human life-the wanton invader of kingdoms neighbouring upon his own-the planner of the ever-infamous conquest and division of Poland —and the direct instrument of bringing desolation into peaceful and flourishing regions, and thus of inflicting incalculable wretchedness upon vast multitudes of human beings-every right-minded person will hesitate to call him a great man. That he was a great soldier is readily conceded. He also affected to be a great philosopher and literary genius; but, although he called one of his palaces by a name signifying that it was the abode of peacefulness and contentment, he gave good proof that he was not "without care"-and that, too, of the most painful kind as may be gathered from the following stanzas from his pen : "Yet a few years, or days perhaps, And time to me shall be no more; No more the sun these eyes shall view; "Alas! I touch the dreadful brink; Yes! death is ever at my hand, Fast by my bed he takes his stand, And constant at my board is found. "But then this spark, that warms, that guides, In the poem from whence these verses are taken, he shows how little it is that either dominion, or conquest, or what is called philosophy, can do towards satisfying him who is an avowed infidel, a practical atheist, and a thoroughly vicious and selfish mansuch as was the mis-called "Frederic the Great." The following stanzas were written in allusion to the martial propensities, and the infidel notions, of this badly-eminent man : "Why must murder'd myriads lose their all— That thou may'st blaze, the meteor of an hour? "Yet know, vain sceptic, know, the Almighty's mind, "Nor shall the pile of hope His mercy rear'd, Shall be by all, or suffer'd or enjoy'd." In yet more recent times there has been another of these wrongly-called great men. This was Napoleon Buonaparte; who, although he doubtless had some good qualities, was, upon the whole, an enemy to the peace and happiness of his fellow-men. That he was a truly great man is more than merely questionable. That he was, however, a great soldier, cannot be questioned, much less can it be denied; but in order to his being so he was induced to become a great invader of human rights, a great |