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makes no mention of a family every member of which was distinguished by so extraordinary a combination of the noblest qualities of heart and head. No contemporary historian or poet can name them without breaking out into passionate praise of their nobleness and as passionate lament for their unmerited fate. “Alas for the sons of Bermek,” cries Salih ben Tarif, “and the happy days of their power! With them the world was as a bride; but now it is widowed and bereft of its children.” “The Barmecides,” says Fekhreddin Razi, “were to their time as a plume to the brow, as a crown to the head. The world was requickened under their administration and the empire carried to the highest pinnacle of splendour. They were the refuge of the afflicted, the providence of the unfortunate.” And all who speak of them echo the same strain. Each of the four sons was distinguished by some special quality, in addition to the virtues which were the general appanage of the family, and the only weak point in their character appears to have been the noble fault they shared with Julius Cæsar[1] and Napoleon III. and
- ↑ Nunquam nocere sustulit, says Suetonius; “he could never bear to do harm.” No feeling is more continually excited by the study of history, ancient and modern, than one of poignant regret that so many great and beneficent rulers should altogether have lacked that power of salutary severity, that (alas! in the interests of humanity, involved in the first condition of government, the summary suppression of “les coquins et les lâches,” too often) necessary brutality, which carries men of far inferior genius, such as Bismarck, triumphantly over all opposition and enables a Narvaez to die peaceably in his bed, happy in the comfortable assurance that he has no enemies to forgive, having industriously shot them all.
