Yet the world is much indebted to that woman. She was to her husband
what the cipher is after the figure one. Alone, it is a unit; with
the cipher by its side, it becomes ten.
She was the wife of John Flaxman, the Sculptor.
"Down with the Austrian woman," shouted the infuriated mob of Paris,
supposing that they saw before them the ill-fated Marie Antoinette.
An officer corrected their mistake, and the lady, just rescued from
the most terrible of deaths,--that of being torn to pieces by
savages,--said to him, "Why undeceive them? You might have spared
them a greater crime."
She was the same, who, when asked her name and rank before the
revolutionary tribunal, replied, with dignity, "I am Elizabeth of
France, the aunt of your king."
She was compelled to witness the execution of twenty-four of her
fellow-prisoners, and then met her own death without a complaint.
Among savage nations what could be more terrific than a volcano? And
when, in addition to its natural mysteries, a cunning priesthood has
invested it with the attributes of a malignant and revengeful deity,
who but an enlightened and civilized person would dare to approach
it? It was _tabooed_, and whoever insulted it, would be destroyed by
its shower of liquid fire.
It is hard to shake off the prejudices and superstitions of a life-
time. Yet Kapiolani, a woman of Hawaii, who had already done much to
raise the character of her countrymen, set the heathen priests at
defiance, declared the volcano to be the work of a merciful God, and
boldly descended some distance into its crater. There she composedly
praised the Lord in the midst of one of His wonderful works. The
effect of her faith upon the minds of her countrymen was wonderful.
"In all that is known of Assyria, the most ancient empire of the
earth, every extant fragment, moral or material, bears evidence of a
sex to which that land of wonders owes the immortality of its
grandeur. The name of Semiramis has preserved (what Sardanapalus
could not destroy, nor Cyrus bury under the ruins of Babylon,) the
memory of the greatest combination of wealth, power, art, and
magnificence, which the world had till then witnessed, or has since
conceived. For the greatest capitals of the most powerful and
refined of modern states, supposed to have reached the acme of
civilization, have but one epithet to mark their supereminence; and
Rome and London (in boast, or in reproach,) have each been called
the Babylon of their own proudest times.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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