There is no doubt that the conduct of Timoleon and Æschylus in killing Timophanes was in the highest degree tutelary to Corinth. The despot had already imbrued his hands in the blood of his countrymen, and would have been condemned, by fatal necessity, to go on from bad to worse, multiplying the number of victims, as a condition of preserving his own power. To say that the deed ought not to have been done by near relatives, was tantamount to saying, that it ought not to have been done at all; for none but near relatives could have obtained that easy access which enabled them to effect it. And even Timoleon and Æschylus could not make the attempt without the greatest hazard to themselves. Nothing was more likely than that the death of Timophanes would be avenged on the spot; nor are we told how they escaped such vengeance from the soldiers at hand. It has been already stated that the contemporary sentiment towards Timoleon was divided between admiration of the heroic patriot, and abhorrence of the fratricide; yet with a large preponderance on the side of admiration, especially in the highest and best minds. In modern times the preponderance would be in the opposite scale. The sentiment of duty towards family covers a larger proportion of the field of morality, as compared with obligations towards country, than it did in ancient times; while that intense antipathy against a despot who overtops and overrides the laws, regarding him as the worst of criminals—which stood in the foreground of the ancient virtuous feeling—has now disappeared. Usurpation of the supreme authority is regarded generally among the European public as a crime, only where it displaces an established king already in possession; where there is no king, the successful usurper finds sympathy rather than censure: and few readers would have been displeased with Timoleon, had he even seconded his brother’s attempt. But in the view of Timoleon and of his age generally, even neutrality appeared in the light of treason to his country, when no other man but him could rescue her from the despot. This sentiment is strikingly embodied in the comments of Plutarch; who admires the fraternal tyrannicide, as an act of sublime patriotism, and only complains that the internal emotions of Timoleon were not on a level with the sublimity of the act; that the great mental suffering which he endured afterwards, argued an unworthy weakness of character; that the conviction of imperative patriotic duty, having been once deliberately adopted, ought to have steeled him against scruples, and preserved him from that after-shame and repentance which spoiled half the glory of an heroic act. The antithesis, between Plutarch and the modern European point of view, is here pointed; though I think his criticism unwarranted. There is no reason to presume that Timoleon ever felt ashamed and repentant for having killed his brother. Placed in the mournful condition of a man agitated by