With this resolution she commanded a funeral pyre to be erected as for a sacrifice: she then gathered the Ministers of State and her People around her; and attired in her robes of Royalty, she ascended the newly-erected Altar of her Nation's freedom! The surrounding multitude, unconscious of her motives, listened with breathless attention to her fervent and patriotic eloquence: she urged them to perpetuate her laws,--to renew their energies for peace or war;--upon her death to place the reins of government in the firm grasp of wise men only, whether they now wielded a priestly sceptre or a peasant's distaff;--as she had no child,--the offspring of her brain they must receive as her successor! To these points of National glory she demanded their oath. The vast assembly, gazing from their elevated Queen to the azure Dome,--and, with one voice, called Apollo, and all his host, to bear witness, and accept their united and sacred Oath;--while Echo caught the sound, and bore it even to the surrounding shores and walls of Carthage, and the People's eyes were raised to Heaven,--the Queen,--sudden as the flash,--stabbed herself to the heart! The high-reared Altar became the funeral pyre of surrounding danger and desolation, for her heroic sacrifice appeased the claims of the warlike king. This act of the Queen of Carthage would be viewed in modern days as madness; but to estimate it correctly, the mind must retire into the Temples of antiquity, when self-immolation was regarded as the highest test of pure and disinterested virtue! As without a _similitude_, there can be no _comparison_, either of Institutions or Nations,--therefore we can only _contrast_ our own with ancient days. This difference in language--the mere instrument of truth properly applied--has been the cause of great injustice to events and personages of antiquity. We have no just right to _compare_ ourselves with the ancients, or to measure _their_ morals or virtues by the standard of our own supposed perfections; and our posterity would be equally as unjust to themselves as to us, were they, twenty centuries hence, to record our actions and institutions by their then received ideas of increased and (truly so) advanced civilization. To be just, they will in mercy to the faults and sins of their ancestors (_i. e._ ourselves) _contrast_, not _compare_ us. The suicide--or rather in ancient phrase--self-immolation of the Queen, was then regarded as the highest virtue; and Cato, the Man of Rome, in after ages (and at the same Utica where the Princess first landed), but _imitated_ the act of Woman at Carthage. A _comparison_ between these two acts _can be_ instituted, because, at the time of their being committed, the ancient world regarded them both in _similitude_ of virtue. The same as the suicidal deaths of the Patriots--Brutus and Cassius,--after the fall of Freedom at Philippi.