table de Bourbon, "Pity not me--pity those who fight against their
king, their country, and their oath!"

Lastly, the passion of love, as it is understood and felt in modern
times, was unknown in antiquity; and to those who reflect how important
a part it bears in the romances and plays of Europe, this will probably
appear like performing Hamlet with the character of the Prince of
Denmark omitted on the occasion. It was impossible they could have it,
because their manners were much more Oriental than European; and young
persons of opposites sexes rarely, if ever, met before marriage. They
had a perfect idea of the mutual affection which arises after marriage;
the tenderness of Hector and Andromache never has been surpassed in any
tongue. With the passions of the harem they were perfectly familiar, and
the dreadful pangs of jealousy never have been painted with more
consummate ability, or more thorough knowledge of human nature.
Euripides, in particular, has delineated the terrible effects of that
passion with a master's hand; witness the raving of Medea at the
desertion of Jason; the fury of Hermione at the captive Andromache. Love
also, as it arises now in an Eastern seraglio, was not unknown to them;
the passion of Phaedra for Hippolytus, as painted by Euripides, is a
proof of it. But the love they thus conceived, had scarce any
resemblance to the passion of the same name, which has risen up with the
general intercourse of the sexes, and chivalrous manners of modern
Europe. It is represented rather as a fever, as a fit of insanity, than
any thing else; and is usually held forth as the withering blast
inflicted by an offended deity, or the mania bequeathed as an
inheritance on an accursed race. The refined and ennobling passion, so
well-known and exquisitely described by the great masters of the human
heart in modern times, that of Othello for Desdemona, of Tancrede for
Clorinda, of Corinne for Oswald, was unknown in antiquity. Even the
passions described by Ovid, which arose amidst the freer manners of the
Roman patricians, had little resemblance to the refined sentiments, the
bequest of the age of chivalry; the one was founded on the subjugation
of mind by the senses, the other on the oblivion of the senses in the
mind. What a vast addition to the range and interest of the drama has
the refining and spiritualizing of this master-passion of the human
breast, by the influence of Christianity, and the institutions of
ch