THE HAMILTON ASSOCIATION. 37 



George Eber's The Princess, and Lew Wallace's Prince of 

 India make ancient Egyptian and modern Turk live again. 

 Your essayist admits that he has never obtained from any other 

 source so vivid an impi-ession of the struggles of the days of 

 Charles II as from Sir Walter Besant's For Faith and Freedom. 

 Historical romance is possible because history is itself romantic. 

 It does not require very imaginative glasses to detect tne 

 romantic element in Petrarch and Laura, Paolo and Francesca, 

 Charles VII of France and Anne of Sorel. Our own prosaic 

 times are not without touches of the same interesting character- 

 istic. The hand and heart of Britain's Queen was given, as all 

 the world knows, to the handsome, cultivated, knightly Albert, 

 of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha,but not before Christian IX of Denmark 

 had sued for the same. Is there not a decided flavor of romance 

 in the subsequent fact of the daughter of the Danish King 

 becoming the wife and Princess of the son of the British Queen? 

 Long centuries ago, even ages before the sensation caused in 

 upper and lower circles by Antony and Cleopatra, other 

 romances, far worthier, affected the history of the world. In 

 the seventh century, B. C, that warlike Median, Cyaxares, 

 attempted the conquest of the Assyrian capital, Nineveh. 

 Nabopolassar was the wise and wily governor of Babylon, 

 subject to Saracus,the Assyrian King. The Median solicited the 

 assistance of the Babylonian, with the promise of independent 

 royalty to the latter, and to make the bargain more binding, the 

 Median Princess Amyitis became the wife of young Nebuchad- 

 nezzar, the Prince and future King of Babylon. Great Nineveh 

 fell, and the allied Monarchs invaded the kingdom of Lydia. 

 Alyattes the King lost no time in securing the alliance of 

 Syennesius, King of Cilicia, and one bright day in the year6io 

 B. C, the decisive encounter was on. Suddenly the sun, as if 

 angry and sorrowful over the strife, went into total darkness. 

 This was the famous Battle of the Eclipse. The combatants 

 were horrified at this evidence of the wrath of the gods. The 

 two principals sent up their allies to arrange an armistice ; 

 and while the heavens curtained the belligerent hosts, Nabopo- 

 lassar and Syennesius perpetrated an exquisite piece of match- 



