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paternal power was instituted or confirmed by Romulus himself; and, after the practice of three centuries it was inscribed on the fourth table of the Decemvirs.

"In the forum, the senate, or the camp, the adult son of a Roman citizen enjoyed the public and private rights of a person : in his father's house, he was a mere thing; confounded by the laws with the moveables, the cattle, and the slaves, whom the capricious master might alienate or destroy, without being responsible to any earthly tribunal. At the call of indigence or avarice, the master of a family could dispose of his children or his slaves. But the condition of the slave was far more advantageous, since he regained by the first manumission his alienated freedom: the son was again restored to his unnatural father; he might be condemned to servitude a second and a third time, and it was not till after the third sale and deliverance that he was enfranchised from the domestic power which had been so repeatedly abused. According to his discretion, a father might chastise the real or imaginary faults of his children, by stripes, by imprisonment, by exile, by sending them to the country to work in chains among the meanest of his servants. The majesty of a parent was armed with the power of life and death; and the example of such bloody executions, which were sometimes praised and never punished, may be traced in the annals of Rome, beyond the times of Pompey and Augustus.

"The exposition of children was the prevailing and stubborn vice of antiquity: it was sometimes prescribed, often permitted, almost always practised with impunity, by the nations who never entertained the Roman ideas of paternal power; and the dramatic poets, who appeal to the human heart, represent with indifference a popular custom which was

palliated by the motives of economy and compassion. If the father could subdue his own feelings, he might escape, though not the censure, at least the chastisement of the laws; and the Roman empire was stained with the blood of infants till such murders were included, by Valentinian and his colleagues, in the letter and spirit of the Cornelian law. The lessons of jurisprudence and Christianity had been insufficient to eradicate this inhuman practice, till their gentle influence was fortified by the terrors of capital punishment."

As regards the exposition of children, it is known to judicial practitioners and to medical men in the manufacturing towns of England, that child-murder by parents is a very frequent practice. But it is very rarely indeed resorted to except under the influence of most intense and agitating feelings, not from cold calculations of interest. Of the feelings of an English mob, like those of an English audience at the play of Pizarro, in favor of a child, an anecdote is related by North in his life of Lord Keeper Guildford. This work is highly interesting in various points of view, and is remarkable for the superiority of the style over that of most writers of the same date. Speaking of Porter, Lord Chancellor of Ireland, he says, "This person had run a strange course of variety in his life. He was a son of a prebendary in Norwich, and a 'prentice boy in that city in the rebellious times. When the Committee-house at Norwich was blown up, he was one that was very active in that rising, and after the soldiers came and dispersed the rout, he, as a rat among jointstools, shifted to and fro among the shambles, and had many pistols shot at him by the troopers that rode after him to kill him. In that distress he had the presence of mind to catch up a little child, that during the rout was frighted, and stood

crying in the streets, and ran away with it.

The people opened a way for him, saying "Make room for the poor child." Thus he got off, put himself into the Yarmouth Ferry, and at Yarmouth took ship and escaped to Holland."

saw the ark among And when she had

Pharaoh's daughter has scarcely received enough credit with posterity for her humanity in taking up Moses from the ark of bullrushes. "And the daughter of Pharaoh came down to wash herself at the river, and her maidens walked along by the river side; and when she the flags, she sent her maid to fetch it. opened it, she saw the child; and, behold, the babe wept. And she had compassion on him, and said this is one of the Hebrews' children. Then said his sister to Pharaoh's daughter, shall I go and call to thee a nurse of the Hebrew women, that she may nurse the child for thee? And Pharaoh's daughter said to her, go. And the maid went and called the child's mother. And Pharaoh's daughter said unto her, take this child away, and nurse it for me, and I will give thee thy wages. And the woman took the child and nursed it. And the child grew, and she brought him unto Pharaoh's daughter, and he became her son." The next two verses relate a transaction which I have always thought less agreeable to read in point of amiability, though, no doubt, it may have higher claims on our admiration. "And it came to pass in those days, when Moses was grown, and he went out unto his brethren, and looked on their burdens; and he spied an Egyptian smiting an Hebrew, one of his brethren. And he looked this way and that way, and when he saw there was no man, he slew the Egyptian, and hid him in the sand." Old Fuller eulogises the mother of Moses. In his character of The Good Parent, he says-" With the mother of Moses, he doth not

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suffer his son to sink or swim, but he leaves one to stand afar off to watch what will become of him." Fuller's Good Wife is, perhaps, in this age and country, a safer pattern for mothers of families than Moses's mother. Her children, though many in number, are none in noise, steering them with a look whither she listeth. In her husband's absence she is deputy husband; on his return, he wonders to find that he has been at home, when he was abroad; she never crosseth her husband in the spring-tide of his anger, but stays till it be ebbing She commandeth her husband by constantly obeying

water. him."

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With respect to Gibbon's notice of the third sale of a Roman son, it gave rise to a singular form of manumission by a parent. It is observed by that eloquent historian, that the jurisprudence of the Romans exhibited the scenes of a pantomime." He gives a lively description of some of these scenes, but, does not notice a son's manumission. The father, son, a friend, and an officer of court (called Libripens) attended before the magistrate. The father sold the son to the friend, and bought him back again three times, on each sale certain formal words were repeated, and the purchase money (a brass sestercius,) was weighed by the Libripens in a pair of scales which he brought for the purpose. The transaction was called a manumission by brass and balance; the weighing indicated the antiquity of the custom, as originating before money was coined.

Roman children were not, however, uniformly in a condition to be pitied. It must have been a very entertaining sight for the children of a Roman who was honored with a triumph, to ride with him in the same chariot drawn by four milk white horses; this they were allowed to do. They must have

enjoyed the show more than the laws permitted their father. For they would have looked at their father's cheeks painted with vermilion, the branch of laurel in his right hand, the ivory sceptre with a golden eagle at the top in his left, the golden. ball hanging from his neck, an amulet against envy. They would have heard the shouts of "Io triumphe," have seen the streets strewed with flowers, and would have enjoyed the jokes of the mimic who was hired to insult the captives that were led in chains. But whilst the children were drinking in these unalloyed pleasures, the laws required a troublesome slave to be stationed behind the father, whispering every now and then in his ear you are only a man! you are only a

man!"

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So the last two days of the Roman feast of Saturnalia derived a name from little images which were presented on those days by parents to children. To conclude these ancient usages, it may be added, with reference to what is said in the early part of this section concerning the love of country, that the Romans always retained a veneration for the place and people from whom they supposed themselves to be sprung. The Ænead and Horace's ode on the designs for rebuilding of Troy are among the numerous instances of this spirit. A horse used annually to be sacrificed at the capitol, in revenge for the mischief done by the famous Trojan horse. The instant the horse was slain, his tail was cut off, and the swiftest runner that could be selected was despatched with it, at full speed, to the house of the Pontifex Maximus, that he might be in time for the blood duly staining the hearth.

One of our own minor poets, Savage, brings a charge of inhumanity against his mother. He was supposed to be the illegitimate son of the Countess of Macclesfield by Lord Riv

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