natural prerogatives?  By what marvels drawn from heaven or from earth, did he, in the twinkling of an eye, again invest himself with the purple, and place between himself and his assassin a host of shadowy lictors?  By the mere blank supremacy of great minds over weak ones.  He fascinated the slave, as a rattlesnake does a bird.  Standing “like Teneriffe,” he smote him with his eye, and said, “Tune, homo, audes occidere C. Marium?”—­“Dost thou, fellow, presume to kill Caius Marius?” Whereat, the reptile, quaking under the voice, nor daring to affront the consular eye, sank gently to the ground—­turned round upon his hands and feet—­and, crawling out of the prison like any other vermin, left Marius standing in solitude as steadfast and immovable as the capitol.

    —­THOMAS DE QUINCY.

Here is a similar example, prefaced by a general historical statement and concluding with autobiographical details: 

    A REMINISCENCE OF LEXINGTON

One raw morning in spring—­it will be eighty years the 19th day of this month—­Hancock and Adams, the Moses and Aaron of that Great Deliverance, were both at Lexington; they also had “obstructed an officer” with brave words.  British soldiers, a thousand strong, came to seize them and carry them over sea for trial, and so nip the bud of Freedom auspiciously opening in that early spring.  The town militia came together before daylight, “for training.”  A great, tall man, with a large head and a high, wide brow, their captain,—­one who had “seen service,”—­marshalled them into line, numbering but seventy, and bade “every man load his piece with powder and ball.  I will order the first man shot that runs away,” said he, when some faltered.  “Don’t fire unless fired upon, but if they want to have a war, let it begin here.”

Gentlemen, you know what followed; those farmers and mechanics “fired the shot heard round the world.”  A little monument covers the bones of such as before had pledged their fortune and their sacred honor to the Freedom of America, and that day gave it also their lives.  I was born in that little town, and bred up amid the memories of that day.  When a boy, my mother lifted me up, one Sunday, in her religious, patriotic arms, and held me while I read the first monumental line I ever saw—­“Sacred to Liberty and the Rights of Mankind.”

Since then I have studied the memorial marbles of Greece and Rome, in many an ancient town; nay, on Egyptian obelisks have read what was written before the Eternal raised up Moses to lead Israel out of Egypt; but no chiseled stone has ever stirred me to such emotion as these rustic names of men who fell “In the Sacred Cause of God and their Country.”

Gentlemen, the Spirit of Liberty, the Love of Justice, were early fanned into a flame in my boyish heart.  That monument covers the bones of my own kinsfolk; it was their blood which