Biography

[Caesar after the battle of Pharsalia.]

Caesar surveyed the field of battle after the victory of Pharsalia, not with the feelings of exultation which might have been expected in a victorious general, but with compassion and sorrow for the fallen soldiers whose dead bodies covered the ground. After gazing upon the scene sadly and in silence for a time, he said, "They would have it so," and thus dismissed from his mind all sense of his own responsibility for the consequences which had ensued.

[His clemency.] [Caesar pursues Pompey.]

[Caesar again at Rome.] [Combinations against him.] [Veni, vidi, vici.]

Caesar's greatness and glory came at last to a very sudden and violent end. He was assassinated. All the attendant circumstances of this deed, too, were of the most extraordinary character, and thus the dramatic interest which adorns all parts of the great conqueror's history marks strikingly its end.

[Jealousies awakened by Caesar's power.] [The Roman Constitution.] [Struggles and Conflicts.]

[Caesar receives many warnings of his approaching fate.]

by Jacob Abbott

[Three great European nations of antiquity.]

There were three great European nations in ancient days, each of which furnished history with a hero: the Greeks, the Carthaginians, and the Romans.

[Alexander.]

[Caesar's resolution.]

Caesar does not seem to have been much disheartened and depressed by his misfortunes. He possessed in his early life more than the usual share of buoyancy and light-heartedness of youth, and he went away from Rome to enter, perhaps, upon years of exile and wandering, with a determination to face boldly and to brave the evils and dangers which surrounded him, and not to succumb to them.

[His person and character.]

Great as Lee's reputation had been before the battle of Chancellorsville, it was immensely increased by that unexpected triumph. But no trace of vanity or self-gratulation of any kind marked his reception of the chorus of praise that greeted him. On the contrary, he modestly disclaimed the honors from the very first and insisted that to Jackson belonged the credit of the day. "Could I have directed events," he wrote the wounded General, "I should have chosen to have been disabled in your stead.

Deerfield, Ohio, was not a place of any importance when Captain Noah Grant of Bunker Hill fame arrived there from the East. Indeed, it was not then much more than a spot on the map and it has ever won any great renown. Yet in this tiny Ohio village there lived at one and the same time Owen Brown, the father of John Brown, who virtually began the Civil War, and Jesse Grant, the father of Ulysses Grant, who practically brought it to a close.

While Lee had been disposing of McClellan, Pope and Burnside, Grant had remained in comparative idleness near Corinth, Mississippi. He had, it is true, been assigned to high command in the West when Halleck was ordered to Washington, but the battle of Shiloh had prejudiced the authorities against him and his troops were gradually transferred to other commanders, leaving him with an army barely sufficient to guard the territory it already held.