whose misfortunes have furnished a never–failing theme to the Greek tragedians, who abound in references[156] to the fatal curse upon these races.[157] It is from the presence of these dread ministers of wrath, visible to her inspired eyes, that Cassandra draws her fearful presages of evil in that scene, perhaps the grandest in Grecian tragedy. “For never shall that bard, whose yelling notes In dismal accord pierce the affrighted ear, Forsake this house. The genius of the feast, Drunk with the blood of man, and fired from thence To bolder daring, ranges through the rooms Linked with his kindred furies: these possess The mansion, and in horrid measures chaunt The first base deed; recording with abhorrence The adulterous lust which stained a brother’s bed.”[158] So, after the catastrophe, the chorus refers to the same cause the accumulated horrors and crimes which weigh down the house of Atreus. “O thou demon, who dost fall On the high Tantalid hall, Well I know thee, mighty fiend, Who here dost ever wend, Haunting down the double line From father unto son! “_Clytem._ Aye, now thy words have sense and grace, Calling on that thrice great fiend, The demon of this race, For ‘tis from him their bowels burn With rage of lapping blood; Ere the old grief has ceased to throb, Young gore comes on amain.”[159] With such ideas concerning an avenging destiny, it is no wonder that the Greeks shunned contact with the inheritors of divine anger; and national prejudice might be more strongly raised by the sacrilege of the Alcmæonidæ, because many of the sufferers were slain at the very altars of the Eumenides, to whom the punishment of such deeds peculiarly belonged, and whose worship had been introduced into Attica in amends for the judicial sentence which delivered Orestes from their power. In modern times an analogous persuasion concerning the fortunes of particular families has prevailed; in illustration of which we may cite the belief in the ill–luck of the Stuarts, a belief almost justified by the series of calamities and bloody deaths which beset the princes of that house: and, indeed, this faith in the influence of misconduct to produce hereditary misfortune has been general in Ireland and the Scottish Highlands, and probably in other countries where a vivid imagination is found in union with no high degree of cultivation and knowledge. In Ireland it is the popular creed, that an estate gained by fraud brings a curse along with it[160] (to open force they seem to be more indulgent); that the possessor becomes a doomed man, and neither he nor his descendants prosper. In Scotland it was thought that a pious parent entailed a blessing upon his offspring, while the punishment of the wicked and oppressor, if not immediately manifested upon himself, or his children, yet surely descended even on succeeding generations. This feeling extended to all classes; and a