It seems that those who have done the most good in this world have usually been the most unfortunate. The history-makers are our martyr heroes, abhored for their virtues, tortured for their courage, and persecuted for their good deeds. Verily, all the world's a stage, and the great actors appear upon it, say their lines, perform their parts, and then disappear behind the curtain amid a storm of hisses. Genius is seldom appreciated at short range. We praise dead saints, and persecute living ones: we roast our great men in one age, and boast of them in the next. Let us see if history does not bear out these assertions.—Alexander the Great died in his youth; Socrates was made to drink the fatal hemlock; Leonidas, the immortal Greek patriot, was hanged; Xerxes was assassinated in his sleep; Scipio was strangled in his bed; Seneca, the Roman moralist, was banished to Corsica; Hannibal took poison to prevent falling into the enemy's hands; Caesar was assassinated by his friends; Philip of Macedon was assassinated by his body guard; Archimedes was stabbed for not going to Marcellus till he had finished his problem; Belisarius was sentenced to death and blinded; Mohammed was despised and persecuted; Bruno was burned alive and his ashes thrown to the four winds of heaven; Dante was banished from Florence; Sir Walter Raleigh was beheaded; Admiral Coligny was murdered at the Massacre of St. Bartholomew; Joan of Arc was burned at the stake; Savonarola was burned on a heap of faggots for his religious preaching; Madam Roland was beheaded; Cardinal Wolsey died on his way to the scaffold; Milton was stricken blind; Martin Luther was excommunicated and persecuted; Anne Boleyn, the good and true wife of Henry VIII, was beheaded; Palissy the Potter had to burn his house to feed his furnace, and was imprisoned in the Bastile for his religious faith; Mary, Queen of Scots, was beheaded after a long imprisonment; Cervantes, creator of Don Quixote, was imprisoned for debt and suffered want; Edmund Spenser, author of "Faerie Queen," also died of want; Henry of Navarre was assassinated; Galileo was made to recant under penalty of death; Napoleon was sent to St. Helena; Oliver Cromwell was an exile, a price upon his head; Charles I. was beheaded, Marshal Ney, "Bravest of the Brave," was cruelly shot to death for alleged treason; Madame Racamier, the most beautiful and charming woman in history, died poor, blind and an exile; Voltaire was arrested, imprisoned and exiled; Beethoven, "The Shakespeare of Music," was stricken deaf; Mozart was buried in Potter's Field; the gallant Decatur and the illustrious Hamilton were cruelly shot by duelists; John Brown was shot for trying to free the slaves; Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley were assassinated; Madame De Stael was banished from Paris because Napoleon did not like her; Florence Nightingale became a chronic invalid; Marie Antoinette was beheaded; Garibaldi was condemned to death and compelled to flee his native land; Gen. Custer fought the Indians till none of his soldiers lived and then died upon the battle-field; Victor Hugo was made to flee Brussels; Lafayette in France was imprisoned and nearly starved to death; David Livingstone, explorer, died in the wilds of Africa; Tasso was exiled and imprisoned and died in poverty; Lovejoy was murdered; Wm. Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips were mobbed on the streets of Boston; Sir Henry Vane was beheaded because he asserted liberty; William Penn was persecuted and imprisoned; Aristides was exiled; Aristotle had to flee for his life and swallowed poison; Pythagoras was persecuted and probably burned to death; Paul was beheaded; Spinoza was tracked, hunted, cursed and forbidden aid or food; Huss, Wyclif, Latimer and Lyndale were burned at the stake; Schiller was buried in a three-thaler coffin at midnight without funeral rites; Pompey was assassinated in Egypt by one of his own officers; Shelley, the poet, was drowned; William, Prince of Orange, was assassinated; Anaxagoras was dragged to prison for asserting his idea of God; Gerbert, Roger Bacon and Cornelius Agrippa, the great chemists and geometricians, were abhored as magicians; Petrarch lived in deadly fear of the wrath of the priests; Descartes was horribly persecuted in Holland when he first published his opinions; Racine and Corneille nearly died of starvation; Lee Sage, in his old age was saved from starvation by his son who was an actor; Boethius, Selden, Grotius and Sir John Pettus wrote many of their best works in jail; John Bunyan wrote Pilgrim's Progress while in prison; De Foe, author of the immortal Cruso, was imprisoned for writing a pamphlet, and so was Leigh Hunt for a similar offense; Homer was a beggar; Plautus turned a mill; Terence was a slave; Paul Borghese had fourteen trades, yet starved with them all; Bentivoglio was refused admission into the hospital he had himself erected; Camoens, author of the Lusiad, died in an alms house; Dryden lived in poverty and distress; Otway died prematurely through hunger; Steele was constantly pursued by bailiffs; Fielding was buried in a factory graveyard without a stone; Savage died in jail at Lisbon; Butler lived in penury and died in distress; Chatterton, pursued by misfortune, killed himself in his youth; Samuel Abbott, inventor of the process of turning potatoes into starch, was burned to death in his own factory; Chaucer exchanged a palace for a prison; Bacon died in disgrace; Ben Johnson lived and died in poverty; Bishop Taylor was imprisoned; Clarendon died in exile; Swift and Addison lived and died unhappy and unfortunate; Dr. Johnson died of scrofula, in poverty and pain; Goldsmith was always poor and died in squalor and misery; Smollett, several times fined and imprisoned, died at 33; Cowper was poor and tinged with madness. Of the American discoverers, Columbus was put in chains and died of poverty and neglect; Roldin and Bobadilla were drowned; Ovando was harshly superceded; Las Casas sought refuge in a cowl; Ojeda died in extreme poverty; Encisco was deposed by his own men; Nicuessa perished miserably by the cruelty of his party; Basco Nunez de Balboa was disgracefully beheaded; Narvaez was imprisoned in a tropical dungeon and afterwards died of hardship; Cortez was dishonored; Alvarado was destroyed in ambush; Almagro was garroted; Pizarro was murdered and his four brothers were cut off.

Doubtless, many other martyrs could be mentioned, but perhaps the foregoing will suffice to prove our case. As Napoleon once said, it is the cause and not the death that makes the martyr, and many of the foregoing martyrs perhaps deserved to die as they did. But, who may say? An additional list will be found in "Fox's Martyrs," but they are mostly religious martyrs, whereas the foregoing is general and fairly representative of every age and of every calling.