[278]
names are inscribed on the monument at Front Royal.
The granite shaft perpetuates the fame of a glorious band—‘a remnant of our Spartan dead.’
About the affair in which they were sacrificed to the bloody moloch of revenge, I feel now as I have always felt.
A Highlander is not asked or expected to forgive or forget Glencoe and Culloden.
It will always be a proud satisfaction to me that, in the presence of their executioners, these martyrs did not imitate the despairing cry of the gladiator in the arena—Caesar, morituri salutamus‘—Caesar, we who are about to die, salute thee’—but, with heroic confidence, foretold that they would have an avenger.
The prophecy was fulfilled.
Those who committed the great crime have not escaped the Nemesis, who adjusts the unbalanced scale of human wrongs.
Called the Furies from the abyss,
And round Orestes bade them howl and hiss.
