[69] This is so much in tradition as to be a matter of common parlance--for instance, when the late Emperor of the French is depicted, this is the language which, upon a certain construction, appears most natural--"On the other side stands a phalanx of satirists, represented by Victor Hugo. The only colour on the palette of those artists is _lamp black_. Morally they paint the ex-Emperor as _dark as a negro_, array him _in the livery of the devil_, and _then_ invoke the _execration_ of history."--_Spectator_, Sept. 17th, 1870. But a point of some difficulty remains to be determined--viz. what precisely was the race which came under this ban. Was it the whole descent of Ham, or only the posterity of Chanaan ? Hales, in his learned work on chronology (i. p. 344), discusses this question. He says that, whereas-- "Even the most learned expositors (Bochart and Mede) have implicitly adopted the appropriation of the curse of servitude to Ham and his posterity." Yet "the integrity of the received text of prophecy, limiting the curse to 'Canaan' singly, is fully supported by the concurrence of the Massorite and Samaritan Hebrew texts, with _all the other_ ancient versions except the Arabian; and is acknowledged, we see, by Josephus and Abulfaragi (_sup._), who evidently confine the curse to Canaan--though they inconsistently consider Ham as the offender, and are not a little embarrassed to exempt him and _the rest of his children_[70] from the operation of the curse--an exemption, indeed, attested by sacred and profane history; for Ham himself had his full share of earthly blessings, his son Misr colonised Egypt, thence styled the land of Ham (Ps. cv. 23), which soon became one of the earliest, most civilised, and flourishing kingdoms of antiquity, and was established before Abraham's days (Gen. xii. 14-20), and in the glorious reign of Sesostris ... while Ham's posterity, in the line of Cush, not only founded the first Assyrian empire, under Nimrod, but also the Persian (?), the Grecian (?), and the Roman (?) empires, in direct contradiction to the unguarded assertion of Mede [that 'there hath never yet been a son of Ham that hath shaken a sceptre over the head of Japheth.'] How, then, is the propriety of the curse exclusively to Canaan to be vindicated?--evidently by considering him as the only guilty person ... upon the very ingenious conjecture of Faber, that the 'youngest son' who offended was not Ham, but Canaan--not the son, but the grandson of Noah. For the original, 'his little son,' according to the latitude of the Hebrew idiom, may denote a grandson, by the same analogy that Nimrod.... this (the former) interpretation is supported by ancient Jewish tradition, 'Boresith Rabba,' sec. 37, recorded also by Theodoret ... the tradition, indeed, also adds that Ham joined in the