uman gore, are all of them vulgar repetitions of what had been
acted countless times already. If Nero or Caligula thought to perpetrate
that which should stand unparalleled, they fell into the grossest error.
The conqueror, who should lay waste vast portions of the globe, and
destroy mighty cities, so that "thorns should come up in the palaces,
and nettles in the fortresses thereof, and they should be a habitation
of serpents, and a court for owls, and the wild beasts of the desert
should meet there," would only do what Tamerlane, and Aurengzebe, and
Zingis, and a hundred other conquerors, in every age and quarter of the
world, had done before. The splendour of triumphs, and the magnificence
of courts, are so essentially vulgar, that history almost disdains to
record them.

And yet there is something that is new, and that by the reader of
discernment is immediately felt to be so.

We read of Moses, that he was a child of ordinary birth, and, when he
was born, was presently marked, as well as all the male children of his
race, for destruction. He was unexpectedly preserved; and his first act,
when he grew up, was to slay an Egyptian, one of the race to whom
all his countrymen were slaves, and to fly into exile. This man, thus
friendless and alone, in due time returned, and by the mere energy of
his character prevailed upon his whole race to make common cause with
him, and to migrate to a region, in which they should become sovereign
and independent. He had no soldiers, but what were made so by the
ascendancy of his spirit no counsellors but such as he taught to be
wise, no friends but those who were moved by the sentiment they caught
from him. The Jews he commanded were sordid and low of disposition,
perpetually murmuring against his rule, and at every unfavourable
accident calling to remembrance "the land of Egypt, where they had
sat by the fleshpots, and were full." Yet over this race he retained a
constant mastery, and finally made of them a nation whose customs and
habits and ways of thinking no time has availed to destroy. This was
a man then, that possessed the true secret to make other men his
creatures, and lead them with an irresistible power wherever he pleased.
This history, taken entire, has probably no parallel in the annals of
the world.

The invasion of Greece by the Persians, and its result, seem to
constitute an event that stands alone among men. Xerxes led against this
little territory an army of 5,2