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and piety," were detailed for the sole care of his standard; one "who bore the standard, in an agony of fear," resigned it on a certain occasion to another, and immediately fell dead upon the spot, pierced by a dart from the enemy; but the standard bearer, though he was assailed by a continued shower of darts, remained unhurt, the staff of the standard receiving every weapon!" It was indeed "a truly marvellous circumstance" which might task the credulity even of Eusebius himself, had he not received this and the other details of the cross and the Labarum on the word and oath of Constantine who related them in his hearing. Such are the fictions and falsehoods of the "blessed emperor," a pattern of piety, of faith, and prayer, and every grace, devised, no doubt, to invest with religious awe his sacred character, and his arms with a divine, resistless charm. We forbear to speak of other marvellous fictions and fables thickly strewn over the pages of Eusebius, which justly entitle him to the unhonored distinction of Father of the legendary superstition of papal Rome.

The exaggerated representations and distorted features which our historian every where gives of events and characters sadly detract from his merits, and often leave us in total uncertainty respecting the truth of his narrative. Licinius, whom Constantine honored with an "illustrious marriage" with his favorite sister, is like the most gracious emperor himself" in "great esteem for moderation and piety. These two pious rulers had been excited by God, the universal sovereign, against the two most profane tyrants," Maxentius and Maximin.

This same Licinius, when a little later at war with Constantine, "being himself of a nature hopelessly debased by sensuality, and degraded by the continual practice of adultery and other shameless vices, assumed his own worthless character as a specimen of human nature generally, and denied that the virtue of chastity and continence existed

'Life of Const. I. c. 28-30. II. c. 9.

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among men." Was Licinius then a pattern of piety, or an example of shocking profligacy?

Constantine, the pious emperor of our worthy bishop, who labors for language adequately to set forth the exalted religious character of his sovereign; Constantine, this pattern of piety, "the meekest and gentlest and most benevolent of men," "whose character shone with all the graces of religion," was the murderer of "his most pious son, Crispus Caesar, resembling in all things his father;" he was the murderer of his own wife Fausta, "the daughter, wife, sister, and mother of so many princes." He put to death Maximian, his father-in-law, and Licinius, the husband of his sister, after having spared his life for a time by her entreaties. Several others, connected with the court of Constantine, are said to have fallen victims to his anger or his suspicion, among whom we may mention particularly the son of Licinius and Constantia, a youth of amiable manners and great promise. "The stern jealousy of Constantine was unmoved by the prayers and tears of his favorite sister pleading for the life of a son whose rank was his only crime, and whose loss she did not long survive." It is difficult to estimate the real character of Constantine. He was a

bloody man, of mean and merciless jealousy; and if at heart a Christian, the bloodiest of all the saints above we must believe, who "have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb."

But his panegyrist, in contemplating the state of the deceased emperor, loses sight of the sober dignity of the historian in this most extraordinary rhapsody. "When I raise my thoughts even to the arch of Heaven, and there contemplate his thrice blessed soul in communion with God Himself, freed from any mortal and earthy vesture, and shining in a refulgent robe of light; and when I perceive that it is no more connected with the fleeting periods and occupations of mortal life, but honored with an ever-blooming crown, and an immortality of endless and blessed existence;

1 Hist. IX. c. 9. Life of Const. I. c. 52.

I stand as it were entranced and deprived of all power of utterance; and so while I condemn my own weakness, and impose silence on myself, I resign the task of speaking his praises worthily to one who is better able, even to Him who alone has power, being the immortal God the Word, to confirm the truth of his own sayings." 1

Making due allowance for the corrupt rhetorical taste of those times, still, when Eusebius becomes so bewildered by what the emperor did, not for a pure spiritual Christianity, but for the outward forms of religion, as to ascribe to the purest motives of piety the tyranny that would not brook a rival, and that was disgraced by the meanest acts of jealousy, revenge, and murder; when he sees the tyrant going, under a divine inspiration, to a war waged only by selfish and sinister motives, and sees him ascend from scenes of carnage and murder, thrice blessed, to the throne of infinite purity; we must withhold from him all confidence as an historian, and all respect as the reputed father of Ecclesiastical History. Whether his exaggerations, legends, and falsehoods are to be received as "pious frauds," or as the convictions of his credulity and zeal for episcopacy, they are equally an impeachment of his authority as an historian.

1 Life of Const. I. c. 2.

ARTICLE V.

AN HISTORICAL SKETCH OF THE INDO-EUROPEAN LAN

GUAGES.

BY REV. B. W. DWIGHT, BROOKLYN, N. Y.

[Continued from page 769, Vol. XIV.]

2. The Italic family.- Three distinct races originally peopled Italy, namely: the Iapygian, Etruscan, and Italian. Of the Japygian race we have but little knowledge. In the extreme part of South-eastern Italy, a considerable number of inscriptions has been found, whose language is essentially different from that of all the other dialects of the land. It possesses, like the Greek, the aspirated consonants. Its genitive forms aihi and ihi answer to the Sanscrit asya and Greek oo, and indicate its origin, although not yet itself deciphered, to be quite certainly Indo-European. These inscriptions are regarded as Iapygian; and the race that spoke it are believed also to have prevailed, at an early date, in Apulia. As the emigrations of masses are, at the first, always landward since seaward movements pre-suppose too great a knowledge of navigation for the first barbarous periods of history; and as the Iapygians occupied the outermost verge of the peninsula, it is natural to suppose, that they constituted the first race that ever came from the East into Italy. Like the Celts, dwelling at last on the flanks of Western Europe, they were pushed further and further from their first resting place, by each successive tide of emigration behind them, until they became lodged in the wilds and fastnesses of Messapia and Calabria, to be driven from these their last homes, rocky and ocean-bound, no more.

As to the Etruscans, it is a question of much doubt among scholars, what was the origin of this ancient and interesting tribe. Donaldson has a theory on the subject,

1 All praise to Donaldson, for his efforts to unveil to English eyes the charms of the new and delightful science of classical philology. But since, in the ab. VOL. XV. No. 57.

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which he utters, like everything else of his own invention, with great assurance. He regards the Etruscan language, as, in part, a Pelasgian idiom more or less corrupted by the Umbrian, and, in part, a relic of the oldest Low-German or Scandinavian dialects. They were composed, accordingly, in his view, of two main elements as a people, namely: Tyrrheno-Pelasgians, more or less intermixed with Umbrians, and Rætians or Low-Germans: the former prevailing in the South, and the latter in the North-western parts of Etruria. But the origin of the Tuscans, notwithstanding this bold analysis of their elementary constitution, as a people, still remains an unresolved enigma. Some peculiarities, serving to identify and isolate their language, as a separate branch of the Indo-European family, are these: 1. They had none of the medial mutes (b, g, d,). Hence, they substituted the smooth mutes for them, in their equivalent forms of Greek words, in which they occurred, as in Tute for Τυδεύς, Utuze for Οδυσσεύς, Melakre for Μελέαγρος. 2. They frequently changed smooth mutes into rough, as in Atresthe and Thethis, Tuscan forms of "Adpaσtos and Oétis.

The Italian race occupied the central part of Italy. From this race, that large peninsula obtained its name and character. They were, at the outset, its great leading race, and became erelong the conquerors of Italy and subsequently of the world. In them we see the great Western home-developments, in a separate form, of the same Graeco-Italic emigration which swarmed in the Pelasgic period from Media. and Persia (when but little civilized), into Europe, a large fragment of which remained behind in Greece, and became so greatly enlarged, refined, and beautified in the Hellenic period, by successive emigrations from Persia, when raised

sence of higher and truer standards in the department of comparative philology in our language, many are disposed to look, with false confidence and even admiration to him for light, it seems well to caution alike the novice and the general student in philology, to remember that whatever in Donaldson is general, and so lies within the field of this science at large, deserves acceptance from him, as it would at the hands of any other good compiler or system-maker; but that whatever in him is specific, and so has in it the separate distinct essence of his own genius, is of very suspicious value.

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