as the Portuguese chronicler, Azurara, who witnessed the scene, reports, were "as black as moles, and so hideous in face and form as to suggest the idea that they were come from the lower regions." They knew enough, even then, to love one another with tender devotion; for, when the time came for each purchaser to take away his own, a scene ensued which melted the heart of the historian. No one seems to have thought of keeping families together, not even the prince, who was present on horseback, and magnanimously gave away on the spot the forty-six captives that fell to his share. He was of the very flower of middle age virtue-much the noblest of Europeans then alive, if not the noblest man of his period; and it was directly through him that the negro came to serve and perplex our modern world. From his "powerful horse" he looked down upon this scene, not unmoved, but never doubting the endless boon it was to these poor blacks to be brought within range of eternal salvation. "There was abundant tear-shedding," Azurara reports, "when the final separation came, and each proprietor took possession of his lot." Fathers and sons rushed from different groups into one another's embrace, and mothers threw themselves upon their infants and refused to give them up. The chronicler consoled himself by reflecting that this grief was but momentary compared with the endless joys of paradise thus made accessible to them; and he declares that he lived to see the children and grandchildren of those very captives, grown to maturity in Lagos, "as good and true Christians as those who had descended, generation by generation, from persons who had been baptized at the commencement of the Christian dispensation." That was not saying much for them, perhaps ; for this devilish work went on, and upon the profits of it the expeditions were continued, which resulted at length in the seavoyage to India and the discovery of a New World.

As we are now in the fourteenth generation since that scene occurred at Lagos, we ought by this time to know something about the negro. Among the primitive races brought to our knowledge through Prince Henry the Navigator and his pupils, the negro alone has given us reason to think that he can receive a civilization based upon industry; for he alone has shown himself capable of industry. The Indian seems to be an irreclaimable aristocrat. In war he is a soldier, in peace a sportsman ;

capable of long-continued and agonizing toil only when a bear is to be shot, or a game won, or an enemy hunted down. He wants a lordly waste of park around his abode; he is a turner of night into day; he will gamble away all he has; he can conquer any foe better than his own propensities. He has eloquence, dignity, pride, courage, and a sense of honor. He can calmly stand at the wrong end of a loaded gun. He can bear twelve hours' roasting before a slow fire and not utter a sound. Still better, traders on the frontier give him a year's credit, and rarely lose by him. He dotes upon his children, and never strikes one of them when he is sober. He gets up late in the morning, sits long at dinner, delights in conversation, and surpasses in telling a story the most accomplished diner-out in Europe. Curiosity is one of his strongest feelings; but such is the politeness of this wild noble that he will not ask a stranger his name or errand until he has given him food, and allowed him ample time for enjoying it. He can wait; he can control his countenance, his tongue, everything but an appetite that destroys him. So like is he to his brother aristocrats in the Old World, that we cannot but think of him sometimes when we read of their doings in the hunting-field, the gambling-saloon, and the race-ground. But the Indian of pure blood will not work; and if you make him work he dies. He cannot receive our knowledge, for he is so credulous that a school is broken up if a medicine-man points a finger at the schoolmaster. In his heart he despises and abhors us, and would kill us all to-morrow if he could.

The negro, on the contrary, has not an aristocratic fibre in his frame; neither the virtues nor the vices of the aristrocrat are his. But he can work, he can love, and he can learn. He takes readily to the hoe and the spelling-book. He clings to the soil that bore him. He improved under slavery from generation to generation, and nowhere so rapidly as in the Southern States, for nowhere else was he treated so well as there. West Indian slavery was hell; Southern slavery was purgatory, that prepared him for the paradise of freedom. The negro did not come into civilization by the cabin-windows, but was tossed up on the forecastle, and has learned whatever he knows of the ropes by the rope's end. He has learned a good deal about the ropes, little as he yet knows of the quadrant and the chronometer.

The South is most happy in possessing him; for it is through his assistance that there will be the grand agriculture in the Southern States which cannot flourish unless there is a class to labor and individuals to contrive. The Northern farmer is surrounded by conditions not favorable to his improvement, for his task is excessively hard, Nature is not gracious to him, and efficient aid is beyond his means. The Southern farmer, by the black man's help, can be a "scholar and a gentleman," and at the same time secure and elevate the black man's life.

The cruelest stroke ever dealt the negro, since the time when he was torn from his native land, was hurling him all unprepared into politics. If this was designed as revenge upon the master, it was a masterpiece of malign policy. This it is that keeps antipathy alive, and postpones the day when white man and black man, equals before the law, shall loyally coöperate in extracting wealth and welfare from the Southern soil. Happily, we have not the choice whether gross ignorance shall be put out of politics, but only whether it shall be done by artifice, by violence, or by law; our fellow-citizens of the South being unanimously resolved not to submit to Tweedian government, which is knavery upheld by ignorance. Perhaps, through their resolute and temperate opposition, we, too, may rise to the height of suppressing the scallawag, and placing at the head of our cities and States their natural chiefs. When, in some fair and rational manner, undeveloped races and immature individuals have been withdrawn from the reach of the politician, with the glad consent of the industrious poor man, whose life has been made wellnigh insupportable by their conjunction, we shall soon cease to hear of a color-line; and, if any kind of antipathy remains, it will only be that which tends to the purity and dignity of both the races.

JAMES PARTON.

IX.

THE EMPEROR HADRIAN AND CHRISTIANITY.

I.

He started for Rome,

TRAJAN'S health grew daily worse. leaving the command of the army of Antioch to his cousin Hadrian, who was also his nephew by marriage. An internal inflammation obliged him to halt at Selinus (now Silinty), on the coast of Cilicia. He died at that place, on the 7th or 8th of August, A. D. 117, at the age of sixty-four. The situation was gloomy: the East was in open rebellion; the Mauritanians, the Britons, and the Sarmatians, were threatening to revolt; Judea, conquered but still seething, boded a new outbreak. A somewhat obscure intrigue, in which Plotina and Matidia appear to have been the leaders, gave the empire to Hadrian at this critical moment.

The choice was a happy one. Hadrian was a man of doubtful morality, but he was a great ruler. Brilliant, intellectual, and eager, his breadth of mind exceeded that of any other of the Cæsars. He did more to establish the empire than any ruler between Augustus and Diocletian. His administrative power was extraordinary. According to our modern standard, he governed too much, but he governed well. He definitely organized the imperial government: he marks an important epoch in the history of Roman law. Up to his time the ruler's house had been that of the first person in the state, consisting, like any other household, of slaves, freedmen, and private secretaries. Hadrian organized the palace; it was necessary to be a knight in order to hold office there, and the servants of Cæsar's household became functionaries. A distinct qualification was given to the permanent council of the sovereign, which consisted chiefly of men skilled in the law; the senators especially attached to the

government were already called comites; business was transacted through officers who were in part constituted by the senate, and not directly by the will of the ruler. The government was still despotic, but it was a despotism analogous to that of the early French monarchy, tempered by councils, by comites, and by independent magistrates. The social improvement was still more important. A great and noble spirit of true liberality and humanity was apparent in everything; the position of the slave received protection; the condition of women was improved; the excesses of paternal authority were restricted, and the lingering remains of human sacrifices were abolished. The emperor's personal character was in accordance with these reforms. He was full of affability to those beneath him, and would not permit his rank to deprive him of his highest pleasure-the right of pleasing others.

He had, with all his faults, a ready, open, original mind. He loved Epictetus, and understood him, without, however, feeling compelled to follow all his precepts. Nothing escaped him; he wished to be informed of everything. Free from the exclusiveness and prejudice which deprived the genuine Roman of any knowledge of the rest of the world, Hadrian had a taste for what was foreign, which he enjoyed and lightly criticised. He was especially attracted to the East. He saw and was amused by its impostures and charlatanism. He became acquainted with all its absurdities; he manufactured oracles, compounded antidotes, and ridiculed medicine. He was, like Nero, a man of letters, and an artist on the throne. His capacity for painting, sculpture, and architecture, was surprising, and he composed pretty verses, but his taste was not pure; he had his favorite actors, and peculiar preferences. His learning, in fact, was superficial, his architecture theatrical. He accepted no religion, no philosophy, nor did he deny any of them. His fine powers of mind vacillated like a weathercock, the sport of every wind; he may be judged by the graceful adieu to life which he muttered a few moments before his death:

All his researches ended in a jest, all his inquiries in a smile. Even the empire rendered him only half serious; his easy, un