daughter of their people”—­their beautiful queen—­so young, so fair, so lately exalted to the pinnacle of honour and glory; adorned with gems and wreathed with flowers, the pride of a monarch and the ornament of a court; now, neglected, abject, forsaken—­included in the doom of her race, prostrate in some secluded apartment of the palace—­her royal apparel exchanged for sackcloth and ashes—­still cleaving to the God of her fathers, and still identifying herself with her kindred and countrymen.  Whether they regarded her royal state, her tender years, her bitter desolation, or her heroic resolution, all the sympathies of the heart, all the purest feelings of the nation, would be called forth in her behalf.

Other feelings would find a place in the hearts of the Jews as they contemplated their present state.  The last deed of the Amalekite would bring to recollection the injuries of ages.  This Haman, who now, in a time of profound peace and full security—­while both races were exiles from the land of their fathers—­had plotted the ruin of their nation, the total extermination of their race; who had doomed the feeble and helpless, the little one and the aged, to perish with the strong man in his might; this Haman was the son of those who fell upon the tribes, faint and weary, in the wilderness; who had pursued them with inveterate hatred; who had ever joined with their foes or stood ready to attack them in their defenceless state.

When we recollect that the conspiracy of Haman but closed the long train of injuries inflicted on Israel by Amalek, we shall not so much wonder at the feelings sometimes expressed by the Jew.  The character of the tribe was still the same—­their course through all years was unaltered.  And now, while Amalek has perished and the Jew survives, we can form no just estimate of that national feud.  Haman was a type of his race—­artful, cruel, treacherous, and bloody; and what the Roman was to Hannibal, what the ancient Persian was to Greece, what the Turk is to modern Greece, what Russia is to the Pole, such was the Amalekite to the Jew.

While Esther had manifested her sense of dependence upon the eternal Ruler of nations, and her faith and reliance upon the God of her fathers, by humbling herself before him and relying upon his protection and interposition in this hour of darkness, she showed, too, a knowledge of the human heart, not often acquired at her age; an instinctive insight into the character and the motives of those around her, with the power of adapting herself to circumstances, that has seldom been displayed in one so young, combined with so many of the higher qualities of the woman.