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.

She knew the weak point in the character of Ahasuerus, and she forgot
not the power of beauty, the influence of personal charms, as she