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OF REVENGE
21
But yet the spirit of Job was in a better tune: Shall we (saith he) take good at God's hands, and not be content to take evil also?[1] And so of friends in a proportion. This is certain, that a man that studieth revenge keeps his own wounds green, which otherwise would heal and do well. Public revenges[2] are for the most part fortunate; as that for the death of Cæsar;[3] for the death of Pertinax;[4] for the death of Henry the Third[5] of France; and many more. But in private revenges it is not so. Nay rather, vindictive persons live the life of witches; who, as they are mischievous, so end they infortunate.[6]
- ↑ "What? shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil?" Job ii. 10.
- ↑ Revenges. Vindications. "And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges." Shakspere. Twelfth Night, v. 1.
- ↑ Julius Caesar, Roman general and dictator, born 100 B.C., was assassinated at a meeting of the Roman senate held on the Ides of March, 44 B.C. His great-nephew, Caius Octavius, then a youth of only nineteen, took it upon himself to avenge Caesar. With Mark Antony and Lepidus he formed the second triumvirate, which relentlessly pursued the assassins. When the republicans, Brutus and Cassius, fell upon their own swords after the defeat at Philippi, 42 B.C., most of them were gone. Philippi was the grave of the Roman republic.
- ↑ The Emperor Pertinax was murdered by the Praetorian guards, March 28, 193 A.D., who then disposed of the crown at public auction to the highest bidder, Didius Julianus. Lucius Septimius Severus was the avenger of Pertinax. Gibbon says of his treatment of the Praetorian guards:
"A chosen part of the Illyrian army encompassed them with levelled spears. Incapable of flight or resistance, they expected their fate in silent consternation. Severus mounted the tribunal, sternly reproached them with perfidy and cowardice, dismissed them with ignominy from the trust which they had betrayed, despoiled them of their splendid ornaments, and banished them, on pain of death, to the distance of a hundred miles from the capital." The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Vol. I. Ch. V. - ↑ Henry III., of France, was assassinated August 1, 1589, by a Jacobin monk, Jacques Clément.
- ↑ The spirit of resentment, which is a sudden passion, is much commoner than that of revenge, a prolonged feud. Revenge is barbaric; the civilized man has too much to think about and to do to nurse a feud. "The fact is, I cannot keep my resentments,
