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Juvenal was a satirist with a moral purpose; the Spaniard Martial, contemporary, was a satirist without one. Martial drew from life, and therefore his works, though coarse, are still interesting. We learn from him what enormous activity in letters was to be found in those days in his native Spain; where every town had its center of learning and apostles and active propaganda of culture.

But the interest of the fight, notwithstanding the martial character of Quentin Durward, was indifferent to him, in comparison with the fate of Isabelle of Croye, which, he had reason to fear, would be a dreadful one, unless rescued from the power of the dissolute and cruel freebooter who was now, as it seemed, bursting the gates of the castle.

The day proceeding the one on which Arthur had joined his troop, the officer in command of the little force ordered a court martial to assemble for the trial of the prisoners concerned in the late murderous attack on the Collector and party.

He was about to express a wish for these martial instruments, and a real sword, when it occurred to him that the fairies were quite equal to the task of providing gifts of infinitely greater value and splendour than even these coveted articles.

Examples of such a nature savor much less of religious persecution than of martial or even civil law; but they served to alienate the mind of the emperors, to justify the severity of Galerius, who dismissed a great number of Christian officers from their employments; and to authorize the opinion, that a sect of enthusiastics, which avowed principles so repugnant to the public safety, must either remain useless, or would soon become dangerous, subjects of the empire.

The majestic martial music to which the procession had moved had diminished to a dim, melodic undertone, over which the prayer of the Primate rose and fell in swift, rhythmic periods a litany of ascription and petition, to which the people, standing with faces towards the East and with outstretched hands, responded full-voiced.

They had been the great martial people of Europe and because Napoleon III. tripped them by the fetish of the Bonaparte name in '70, people thought that they were no longer martial. This puts the world in the wrong, as it implies that success in war is the test of greatness.

There are, in the Latin language, no less than one hundred and fifteen words and expressions in general usage. But it is in Martial that we are able to sense the abandoned and cynical attitude of the Roman public toward this vice: the epigram upon Cantharus, xi, 46, is an excellent example.

A drumhead court martial was held on the spot, and the verdict was a foregone conclusion. The culprits were found guilty in a body and sentenced to immediate execution. Then Keith possessed himself surreptitiously of the family hammer, and when his mother came to investigate the noise he was making the whole offensive regiment had been reduced to scraps.

What of the whole judicial or quasi-judicial administration of martial law?