_L. c._, p. 173: "It may not unfairly be doubted whether a people prostrate after civil conflict has ever received severer measure than was dealt out to the so-called reconstructed Confederate States during the years immediately succeeding the close of strife. That the policy inspired at the time a feeling of bitter resentment in the South was no cause for wonder." To me the cause for wonder was and is that a Virginian of Virginians should have wholly forgotten the bitterness, as is evinced by the following passage in an oration delivered shortly after the publication of this article:
"No such peace as our peace ever followed immediately upon such a war as our war. The exhausted South was completely at the mercy of the vigorous North, and yet the sound of the last gun had scarcely died away when not only peace, but peace and goodwill were re-established, and the victors and the vanquished took up the work of repairing the damages of war and advancing the common welfare of the whole country, as if the old relations, social, commercial and political between the people of the two sections had never been disturbed."--CHARLES MARSHALL, of Lee's Staff, on Grant, May 30, 1892.]
[Note: It was out of the bitterness of this reconstruction period that I penned the following sonnet to the memory of JOHN M. DANIEL, editor of the Richmond Examiner, to which paper I contributed more than threescore editorial articles during the year 1863-4:
We miss your pen of fire, whose cloven tongue Illum'd the good and blasted what was base. We miss you, fearless fighter for our race, Your arrows words, your bow a will highstrung. We miss you, for you tower'd from among The herd of writers with that careless grace That springs from undisputed strength. Your place Is vacant still. Your bow is still uphung. 'Tis well. This were no time for you. The strings Of your proud heart forefelt the blow and broke; And when you died, 'twas better thus to die Than live to see this swarm of crawling things, And burn with words that must remain unspoke Where "art is tongue-tied by authority."]
[Note: The school was the Episcopal High School near Alexandria, Virginia; the principal, the late L. M. BLACKFORD.]
According to Ovid, Briseis was a non-Greek. _Littera_, she writes (v. 2), _vix bene barbarica Graeca notata manu_. According to recent authorities, she was a Lesbian girl. We know from Homer that Achilles was musical as Odysseus was not.