It seems that those who have done the most good in this world have usually been the most unfortunate. The history-makers are our martyr heroes, abhored for their virtues, tortured for their courage, and persecuted for their good deeds. Verily, all the world's a stage, and the great actors appear upon it, say their lines, perform their parts, and then disappear behind the curtain amid a storm of hisses. Genius is seldom appreciated at short range. We praise dead saints, and persecute living ones: we _roast_ our great men in one age, and boast of them in the next. Let us see if history does not bear out these assertions.--Alexander the Great died in his youth; Socrates was made to drink the fatal hemlock; Leonidas, the immortal Greek patriot, was hanged; Xerxes was assassinated in his sleep; Scipio was strangled in his bed; Seneca, the Roman moralist, was banished to Corsica; Hannibal took poison to prevent falling into the enemy's hands; Caesar was assassinated by his friends; Philip of Macedon was assassinated by his body guard; Archimedes was stabbed for not going to Marcellus till he had finished his problem; Belisarius was sentenced to death and blinded; Mohammed was despised and persecuted; Bruno was burned alive and his ashes thrown to the four winds of heaven; Dante was banished from Florence; Sir Walter Raleigh was beheaded; Admiral Coligny was murdered at the Massacre of St. Bartholomew; Joan of Arc was burned at the stake; Savonarola was burned on a heap of faggots for his religious preaching; Madam Roland was beheaded; Cardinal Wolsey died on his way to the scaffold; Milton was stricken blind; Martin Luther was excommunicated and persecuted; Anne Boleyn, the good and true wife of Henry VIII, was beheaded; Palissy the Potter had to burn his house to feed his furnace, and was imprisoned in the Bastile for his religious faith; Mary, Queen of Scots, was beheaded after a long imprisonment; Cervantes, creator of Don Quixote, was imprisoned for debt and suffered want; Edmund Spenser, author of "Faerie Queen," also died of want; Henry of Navarre was assassinated; Galileo was made to recant under penalty of death; Napoleon was sent to St. Helena; Oliver Cromwell was an exile, a price upon his head; Charles I. was beheaded, Marshal Ney, "Bravest of the Brave," was cruelly shot to death for alleged treason; Madame Racamier, the most beautiful and charming woman in history, died poor, blind and an exile; Voltaire was arrested, imprisoned and exiled; Beethoven, "The Shakespeare of Music," was stricken deaf; Mozart was buried in Potter's Field; the gallant Decatur and the illustrious Hamilton were cruelly shot by duelists; John Brown was shot for trying to free the slaves; Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley were assassinated; Madame De Stael was banished from Paris because Napoleon did not like her; Florence Nightingale became a chronic invalid; Marie Antoinette was beheaded; Garibaldi was condemned to death and compelled to flee his native land; Gen.