elephants, that he had conquered five years before. This time he slew that general, Nicanor, besides dispersing his enormous force, and slaying fifty thousand of them. Seeing no end to this kind of conflict, and having understood that Rome could make peace by giving her mere protection, Judas applied to Rome for an alliance which should serve that purpose. Rome was always gracious to such applications; and a treaty was made without delay; but Judas never heard of it. His followers had left him, weary of the war; and he had only eight hundred men when attacked in vengeance for Nicanor’s defeat and death. He was conquering in one part of the field when assailed in another; and he soon lay dead among his bravest comrades. It was not far from the home of his childhood. His brothers Simon and Jonathan made a truce with the enemy and laid him, with all funeral honours, beside his father, in the family burial-place at Modin.
It was under the apprehension that Jerusalem would be hopelessly defiled, that Judas had applied for the Roman alliance. The Syrians had declared that they would burn the Temple, and rebuild it to Bacchus. To save it was now the aim of his surviving brothers. But John, the eldest, was soon after slain in the desert by a party of Arabs, while he was acting as escort to the property of some allies. Jonathan was now to be the great Maccabee. At first there seemed to be no hope of a rally, while renegade and wavering Jews were everywhere in good understanding with the enemy: and Jonathan lay for many months hidden in the wilderness of Tekoah with a band of warriors, protected by the Jordan on one side and a swamp on the other. From their retreat they waged a guerilla war, supported by Simon’s success in holding some strong posts.
In following the story of vicissitude, we find Jonathan after a time Ruler of all Judea but Jerusalem and two or three cities, where his authority was still defied; and at length he appears supreme, and honoured for his holy uprightness as much as gloried in for his military greatness. He was High Priest when he stormed Joppa, and destroyed the great temple of Dagon at Azotus, and Simon became Captain General of the whole country. The fortresses were built up, the treaty with Rome was renewed, and Jonathan had a strong and proud army before Ptolemais when he found a fatal enemy where he least looked for it. The general of an ally, Tryphon, invited him to a conference about getting possession of Ptolemais; and he went. But his host aspired to hi master’s crown, and dreaded Jonathan’s honesty as an obstacle. He made him prisoner. Simon was instantly called to the command of the troops, and he sent the ransom demanded for Jonathan, and two of the children as hostages. But Tryphon murdered instead of releasing his prisoner, after accepting the ransom and hostages. Simon recovered the body of his fourth slain brother, and laid him beside the old father at Modin.
Simon’s rule was worthy of his early reputation for wisdom. He raised his country to a high state of prosperity and strength, maintained a good understanding with Rome, and kept up the military efficiency of the nation while encouraging its agriculture and commerce. More than all, he rendered the Temple secure by at length taking the citadel, and destroying not only the castle but the hill on which it stood, so that the Temple courts and buildings could no longer be commanded from any point.
He, too, was slaughtered, and by an even blacker treachery. His son-in-law was bribed by the Syrian king with the offer of the sovereignty of Judea; and he murdered the aged Simon and his eldest son at a banquet at Jericho. The plot failed, for another son escaped, and became High Priest: but the last of the band of brothers was gone.
There remained in one of the courts of the Temple a pillar bearing a brazen inscribed plate, on which the honours and offices of Simon were recorded, with the pledge of the Jewish nation that they should belong to his posterity for ever. There arose also a landmark on a hill on the shore near Joppa, well known to mariners for centuries after. It was the sepulchre of the Maccabees at Modin, a structure supported by seven pillars consecrated to the memory of Mattathias, his wife, and their five warrior sons.
Such was the life of great patriot-captains in the olden time. Of the great Soldier of the middle-ages there is perhaps no better example than Wallenstein.
If we call him a soldier of fortune, it is not in the lower sense of a man who sells his sword and pawns his life for money, because he does not know what better to do with himself. Albrecht Wallenstein was not an adventurer of this sort; but he was intensely ambitious; the career of arms was then the most open road for ambition; and Wallenstein was the man to take that road, whether there was a holy cause, or no cause at all, in view at the end of it.
His pride showed itself early. He exclaimed against being whipped at seven years old, because princes are not whipped, and he, meaning to be a prince, considered himself one already. He was of an old family in Bohemia, and the son of a baron. He neglected no preparation for greatness, and mastered all that he could of the learning of his day. Astrology was one of his studies, and the favourite one,—partly perhaps because it flattered his hopes of greatness. A youth of indisputable genius, who improves his powers, and has a passion of any kind, is sure to be ministered to, in regard to that passion, by everybody about him, from his teachers to his trencher-man.
Thus, from the stars in their courses to the hounds in the baron’s kennels, all boded greatness to Albrecht Waldstein, as his family name was written in his early days. But his relatives did not know what to think when he early disappointed them in the tenderest point of all. Bohemian Protestants as they were (at the end of the sixteenth century, when Protestantism was a passion in central Europe), it was a dreadful blow to them to hear that some Jesuit tutors had made Albrecht a Catholic. Next, he returned home, and, at three-and-twenty, married an aged widow, apparently for her wealth. At the end of eight years she was dead, and he was lord of fourteen landed estates which