5 The duty of society to inflict capital punishment on the murderer has been maintained on the ground of the Divine command to that effect, said to have been given to Noah, and thus to be binding on all his posterity. (Genesis ix. 5.) My own belief—founded on a careful examination of the Hebrew text—is, that the _human_ murderer is not referred to in this precept, but that it simply requires the slaying of the beast that should cause the death of a man,—a precaution which was liable to be neglected in a rude state of society, and was among the special enactments of the Mosaic law. (Exodus xxi. 38.) If, however, the common interpretation be retained, the precept requires the shedding of the murderer’s blood by the _brother_ or nearest kinsman of the murdered man, and is not obeyed by giving up the murderer to the _gallows_ and the _public executioner_. Moreover, the same series of precepts prescribes an abstinence from the natural juices of animal food, which would require an entire revolution in our shambles, kitchens, and tables. If these precepts were Divine commandments for men of all times, they should be obeyed in full; but there is the grossest inconsistency and absurdity in holding only a portion of one of them sacred, and ignoring all the rest. 6 Latin, _virtus_, from _vir_, which denotes not, like _homo_, simply a human being, but a man endowed with all appropriate manly attributes, and comes from the same root with _vis_, strength. The Greek synonyms of _virtus_, ἀρετή, is derived from Ἀρης, the god of war, who in the heroic days of Greece was the ideal man, the standard of human excellence, and whose name some lexicographers regard—as it seems to me, somewhat fancifully—as allied through its root to ἀνήρ, which bears about the same relation to ἄνθρωπος that _vir_ bears to _homo_. 7 In the languages which have inherited or adopted the Latin _virtus_, it retains its original signification, with one striking exception, which yet is perhaps an exception in appearance rather than in reality. In the Italian, virtu is employed to signify taste, and _virtuoso_, which may denote a virtuous man, oftener means a collector of objects of taste. We have here an historical landmark. There was a period when, under civil despotism, the old Roman manhood had entirely died out on its native soil, while ecclesiastical corruption rendered the nobler idea of Christian manhood effete; and then the highest type of manhood that remained was the culture of those refined sensibilities, those ornamental arts, and that keen sense of the beautiful, in which Italy as far surpassed other lands, as it was for centuries inferior to them in physical bravery and in moral rectitude.