_Alas, poor child! Fortune forsook thee even at thy birth._ The heavens are overcast, the elements Are turbid, and the very sea and winds Are all combined against me. _Thou, my child, Know'st not the dark misfortunes into which Thou art so early plunged, but happily Lackest the power to comprehend thy fate._ What I would crave of thee, my life, since I Must never more be blessed with seeing thee, Is that thou never, never wilt forget To say, as thou wert wont, thy _Ave Mary_; For that bright queen of goodness, grace, and virtue Can loosen all thy bonds and give thee freedom. AYDAR. Behold the wicked Christian, how she counsels Her innocent child! You wish, then, that your child Should, like yourself, continue still in error. JUAN. _O mother, mother, may I not remain? And must these Moors, then, carry me away?_ MOTHER. _With thee, my child, they rob me of my treasures._ JUAN. O, I am much afraid! MOTHER. 'Tis I, my child, Who ought to fear at seeing thee depart. Thou wilt forget thy God, me, and thyself. What else can I expect from thee, abandoned At such a tender age, amongst a people Full of deceit and all iniquity? CRIER. _Silence, you villainous woman! if you would not Have your head pay for what your tongue has done._ [Footnote 133: This translation is borrowed from Sismondi's Literature of the South of Europe, by Roscoe, vol. iii. p. 381. There is a letter of "John Dunton, Mariner," addressed to the English Admiralty in 1637, which might furnish the foundation of a similar scene. "For my only son," he says, "is now a slave in Algier, and but ten years of age, and like to be lost forever, without God's great mercy and the King's clemency, which, I hope, may be in some manner obtained."--Osborne's Voyages, vol. ii. p. 492.] From this scene we gladly avert the countenance, while, from the bottom of our hearts, we send our sympathies to the unhappy sufferers. Fain would we avert their fate; fain would we destroy the system of slavery, that has made them wretched and their masters cruel. And yet we would not judge with harshness an Algerine slave owner. He has been reared in a religion of slavery; he has learned to regard Christians, "guilty of a skin not colored like his own," as lawful prey; and has found sanctions for his conduct in the injunctions of the Koran, in the custom of his country, and in the instinctive dictates of an imagined self-interest. It is, then, the "peculiar institution" which we are aroused to execrate, rather than the Algerine slave masters, who glory in its influence, and, so perfect is their misery, Not once perceive their foul disfigurement, But boast themselves more comely than before.