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The first is the raising of the Brazen Serpent in the wilderness; the second, the punishment of Haman; the third, the victory of David over Goliath; the fourth, Judith with the head of Holofernes.
Holofernes is represented as a savage and cruel Viking, reveling in his mead hall; and when the heroic Judith cuts off his head with his own sword and throws it down before the warriors of her people, rousing them to battle and victory, we reach perhaps the most dramatic and brilliant point of Anglo-Saxon literature.
She came from Albemarle, and her name is Judith. If I were Holofernes and a Judith like that wanted my head, by George, I'd cut it off myself to please her! Yes, yes, my friend! Miss Cary, may I present my Chief of Staff, Major the Baron Heros von Borcke? Talk poetry with him, won't you? Ha, Fauquier! that was a pretty dash you made yesterday! Rather rash, I thought "
And she went out into the valley of Bethulia and baptized her in the water of the well. And she stretched her hands up to the God of Israel, praying the good Lord that he would govern her way for to deliver his people; and thus she did unto the fourth day. Then Holofernes made a great feast, and sent a man of his, named Bagoas, for to entreat Judith to come eat and drink with him.
Besides numberless pictures of the flagellation, crucifixion, and descent from the cross, we have Judith with the head of Holofernes, Herodias with the head of John the Baptist, Jael assassinating Sisera in his sleep, Peter writhing on the cross, Stephen battered with stones, Sebastian stuck full of arrows, Laurence frying upon the coals, Bartholomew flaed alive, and a hundred other pictures equally frightful, which can only serve to fill the mind with gloomy ideas, and encourage a spirit of religious fanaticism, which has always been attended with mischievous consequences to the community where it reigned.
It were supererogatory to attempt dealing with the ladies mentioned in the Bible and the Apocrypha, such as Jael, who drove the nail into the head of Sisera, or Judith, who cut off the head of Holofernes. Their stories are plainly and excellently told in the Scriptural manner, and the adding of detail would be mere fictional exercise.
And when all the host had heard how Holofernes was beheaded, counsel and mind flew from them, and with great trembling for succor began to flee, in such wise that none would speak with other, but with their heads bowed down fled for to escape from the Hebrews, whom they saw armed coming upon them, and departed fleeing by fields and ways of hills and valleys.
Judith, when she appeared before the tent of Holofernes in the whole pomp of her charms, and appareled with the most elaborate attention to splendor of effect, for the purpose of captivating the hostile general, did not omit this ornament.
Near the altar are: Right, The Deliverance of the Israelites by the Brazen Serpent. Left, The Execution of Haman. Near the entrance are: Right, Judith and Holofernes. Left, David and Goliath. Michael Angelo was thirty-nine years of age when he painted the ceiling of the Sistine.
One of them represents the Virgin appearing to a ship in a storm, with a visage and demeanor which might as well accompany a flying mermaid; another describes a man run over by a cart, and preserved unhurt by a similar interference; a third, the recovery from a sick bed, and the joy of the friends on the occasion, whose countenances not a little reminded us of our grim friends Damon and Holofernes.
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