and it would be unfair to charge upon the Roman people the enormous crimes committed under the military tyrannies which they established. If we look for parallels in modern history, the search will not be more successful. The domestic quarrels as well as the structure of the Italian states, bear a close analogy to those of the Greek republics, and the contests of the oligarchical and democratic parties, and the influence of Sparta or Athens, as one or the other prevailed, may be closely exemplified by the bitter quarrels of the Guelphs and Ghibelines, and the interest exerted, by means of these parties, by the Pope and the Emperor. But full as is Italian history of desperate feuds, we cannot call to mind any one worthy to be compared with the transactions at Corcyra. The massacre, called the Sicilian Vespers, when 8000 French were surprised and slain in one night, by a simultaneous insurrection of the native Sicilians, is a memorable and frightful example of popular revenge: but the act of a people rising in defence of its rights, atrocious as is such a method of asserting them, is not to be placed by the side of so cold–blooded, and unprovoked, and faithless a massacre as that of the conquered Corcyreans. The massacre of St. Bartholomew might compete with it in point of treachery, but the ground of quarrel, and the relation of the contending parties, were entirely dissimilar. The outrages committed in France by the insurgent peasantry, called Jacquerie, are unlike the massacres at Corcyra, inasmuch as they belong to an earlier stage of society, a stage again different from that contemplated by Dr. Arnold, when he speaks of the harmless nature of that earlier quarrel in which property and numbers are united against property and birth. These risings, and the corresponding risings in England, were the acts of men without property, and many of them without a legal capability of acquiring it; men hostile to all the institutions of society, because to them society had been little but an engine of oppression. They were the efforts of brute force against all that is superior to itself; the rage of the untamed wolf after he has broken his chain. We say this not in justification of the conduct of their feudal lords, nor in censure of their earnest desire to break the yoke which bore them down to the ground. But whether their cause was good or bad, the method of their advocating it was brutal; and herein servile wars, if not most formidable as to their result, are most to be deprecated, because the passions of each party are sure to be exasperated to the uttermost: and because the insurgents, being without the pale of the laws of war, have no temptation to show mercy, and no hope but in victory. And so to the Jacquerie, every thing more refined or exalted than themselves was the object of their deadly hate. They had no thought to raise themselves; that was beyond the grasp of their minds: but they were bent on pulling down others to their own