benefited by the consequent security of his capital, and general protection of his threatened hereditary states. French writers pretend that Sobieski in his youth had served in the Mousquetaires of Louis XIV. M. de Châteaubriand, in his recent biography of the celebrated Abbé de Rancé, a work little calculated to enhance his literary fame, alleges it, but the assumption seems destitute of proof. Our young Pretender, Charles Edward Stuart, was this monarch's maternal great-grandson. (See, with regard to the battle of Lepanto, &c., our first volume, page 291.) Under the date of June 11, 1816, as reported in this Magazine for Nov., 1839, p. 456, Mr. Green, on visiting the Duke of Manchester's residence at Kimbolton, numbers among the paintings, "The Grand Duke of Alva, with his secretary, Machiavel, by Titian." But, assuredly, the celebrated Florentine, usually distinguished, indeed, as secretary to his native state, never attended in that or any other capacity this grandee of sanguinary fame. In fact, the last public or ostensible act of Machiavel's life was his adhesion to the League, formed in 1526 against Alva's sovereign, Charles V., in repression of that emperor's imputed aspiration to universal monarchy, after the defeat and capture of his most powerful adversary, or check to his views, at Pavia the preceding year. Machiavel died the following summer, 1527, when Alva, born in 1508, was scarcely nineteen, and, holding no official employment, could little require such a secretary. See Guicciardini, "Dell' Istoria d'Italia. Venice, 1567, 4to." lib. xvii.* *This and the succeeding three books, supplementary to the historian's original publication, limited in number to sixteen, and printed at Florence in 1561, two volumes, 8vo., are greatly inferior in depth of reflection or merit of Here, before I close this volume, I wish to supply an accidental omission in the article on Torture, at the preceding page 495, line 11, and to observe, as there intended, that although the humane decree of the National Assembly in 1791, had expressly limited capital punishment to simple beheading, and that no example can be cited of any severer infliction of death in France, this abstinence from torture was not equally adhered to in the invaded territories. One fearful instance at least of the contrary occurred in Egypt. There, on the 11th of June, 1800, (25 Prairial, an. viii.,) the successor in command to Bonaparte, General Kleber, was assassinated by a young fanatic, Soleiman al Kaleby, on whom the ingenuity of science and passion of vengeance were combined in consultation to wreck the direst devices of torture. He was then condemned to have his right hand slowly burned, and his impaled body to remain exposed until reduced to a skeleton by the birds of prey, &c. Yet, all this he bore without a murmur, with every aggravating infliction, while constantly reciting some lines of the Koran. At the end of a month, his corpse was detached from the pale or stake, and conveyed, together with that of his victim, to Paris, where I recollect it at the "Jardin des Plantes," in the first anatomical apartment, on the left at entrance. Soleiman was not above four and twenty, and of diminutive frame, while Kleber was of loftiest stature. But see "La narrative to their predecessors; nor, indeed, are continuations or compositions resumed at distant intervals, generally of maintained spirit, or equivalent impression, compared with first conceptions. Authors, no doubt, may be named, whose renewed labors do not betray this disparity, such as Gibbon, who, however, enjoyed all the requisites he had contemplated for the pursuit of his history, "health, leisure, and inclination." Biographie Universelle," doubtless, the best rep tory of information, and, consequently, our gene guide, on French subjects, though, as previously served, by no means entitled to this commendation the biography of other people. (See page 233, an Our own eastern annals, we must blush to ackn ledge, record similar, or, if possible, more horrify deviations from our home leniency of capital exe tions, as the trial of Hastings too clearly demonstra when the invention of man was stretched in inten of exertion, to devise some unparalleled engines torment for the female victims, who were thus m to suffer the most exquisite tortures, and unname barbarities. THE END. Biographie Universelle," doubtless, the best reposi- Our own eastern annals, we must blush to acknow- THE END. |