Preface. The faithful old man, the first path of believing, was Abram, the late father of a blessed seed, whose name an added syllable enlarged: called Abram by his parent, Abraham by God. He who dedicated his aged pledge as a victim, teaching, when one wishes to make offering at the altar, that what is sweet to the heart, what is pious, what is one's only treasure, should be gladly offered to the God in whom he trusts — he persuaded that we should war against the profane nations, and as a persuader gave his own example, and not to beget marriage-offspring pleasing to God, brought forth from a mother of virtue, until the warlike spirit should overcome with great slaughter the portents of a heart in bondage. Fierce kings had by chance captured the conquered Lot, dwelling in the criminal cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, which the foreigner cherished, mighty in the honour of his cousin's glory.
Abram, roused by the sinister tidings, hears that his kinsman, captured by the fortune of war, serves in the harsh bonds of the barbarians: he arms three hundred and three times six homeborn slaves, that they may go to cut down the backs of the fleeing foe, whom rich plunder and noble triumph held entangled with captive forces. Nay, he himself draws his sword and, full of God, drives off the proud kings, weighed down by the mass of their spoils, routs them in flight, tramples down the wounded, breaks the chains and frees the booty: gold, girls, little ones, necklaces, herds of mares, vessels, garments, heifers. Lot himself, his fetters broken, set free, lifts up his neck, liberated from the worn collar. Abram, the scatterer of the enemy's triumph, returns renowned, his brother's offspring recovered, lest the violence of the worst of princes should possess any progeny of the faithful blood.
While the man was still fresh from so great a slaughter, a priest presents him with heavenly fare — a priest of God, both king and likewise mighty, whose origin, hidden by an unspeakable source, betrays no author of himself: Melchizedek, of what stock, of what ancestors unknown, known to God alone. Soon too the threefold Trinity of angels revisits the dwellings of its aged host, and now Sarah, fertile in her withered womb, an exhausted mother, marvels at the gift of youth, rejoicing in an heir and repenting of her laughter. This was a line marked beforehand for a figure, which our life may re-engrave with right step: we must keep watch in the armour of faithful breasts, and every part of our body that, captured, serves foul lust, must be freed by forces mustered at home;
we are richly endowed with homeborn slaves, if we recognize in the mystic figure what three hundred with twice nine added can do. Soon Christ himself, who is the true priest, begotten of an unspeakable and single parent, offering food to the blessed victors, will enter the small cottage of a chaste heart, showing the honour of the hospitable Trinity. Then the Spirit will make the soul, wedded by his embraces in piety, long barren of offspring, fertile from perennial seed; then the late mother, possessing her dowry, with a worthy heir will fill the house of the Father.
O Christ, ever pitying the heavy toils of men, you who are renowned by your Father's might and by your own, yet one (for we worship one God under both names, and not yet a solitary one, since you, O Christ, are God from the Father) — declare, our King, by what soldier the mind, armed, may be able to drive faults from the cavern of our breast, whenever, with the senses thrown into turmoil within, sedition arises and the brawl of diseases wearies the soul; what defence then, what battle-line should withstand with better hand for the guarding of our liberty amid the furies mingled within the heart. For not, good leader, have you exposed Christians, destitute of great virtues and lacking sinews, to ravaging vices.
You yourself bid the saving troops do battle in the besieged body; you yourself arm the mind with surpassing arts, by which, mighty to assault the mockeries of the heart, it may fight for you and conquer for you. The means of conquering is at hand, if we may note, hand to hand, the very faces of the virtues and the portents struggling against them with hostile force. First Faith seeks the field, to fight under the doubtful lot of the duel, disordered in rustic garb, her shoulders bare, her hair unshorn, her arms uncovered; for the sudden heat of glory, blazing for new battles, remembers neither to gird herself with weapons nor with covering, but trusting in her strong breast and with limbs uncovered, she challenges the perils of mad war to be broken. Behold, with her forces joined, the Worship of the Old Gods dares first to strike at Faith as she provokes her.
She, rising taller, overthrows the hostile head and the temples decked with fillets, and applies to the ground the mouth glutted with the blood of beasts, and tramples with her foot the eyes squeezed out in death; and the broken commerce of the intercepted throat constricts the malignant soul, and long-drawn sighs make weary its difficult passing. The victorious legion exults, which Faith the queen, mustered a thousand strong of martyrs, had roused against the foe. Now she crowns her brave comrades with flowers for the praise they have won, and bids them be clothed in glowing purple.
Next, ready to engage on the grassy field, the maiden Chastity gleams in splendid arms, whom Lust of Sodom, girded with her native torches, attacks, and thrusts into her face a pitch-pine ablaze with burning sulphur, and assails her modest eyes with flames, and tries to overwhelm her with foul smoke. But the unflinching virgin strikes with a stone the right hand of the blazing fury and the fiery darts of the dread she-wolf, and beats off the brands she has shaken loose from her sacred face. Then she pierces the throat of the disarmed harlot with a thrust of the sword; the other vomits hot vapours, clotted with filthy blood; thence a foul spirit, breathing out, pollutes the neighbouring air.
'This she has earned,' cries the victorious queen; 'this shall be your final end; you shall lie forever prostrate, nor shall you any longer dare to scatter death-bearing flames upon the menservants and maidservants of God, in whom the inmost vein of a chaste spirit alone glows from the lamp of Christ. Could you, O tormentress of men, with strength regained, have grown warm again with the breath of your quenched head, after the neck of Holofernes, severed, washed his Assyrian bridal chamber drenched with amorous blood, and harsh Judith spurned the jewelled couch of the adulterous chief and with the sword restrained his unchaste frenzies, a woman bearing off a famous trophy from the enemy with no trembling hand, my avenger made bold from heaven?
But perhaps, less brave, the matron still fighting under the shadow of the Law, while she prefigures our times, in which true virtue has flowed into earthly bodies, was to cut off the proud head through her weak ministers. Is there now any right left for you even after the inviolate virgin's childbearing? After the virgin's childbearing, since which the pristine origin of human flesh has forsaken its nature, and a lofty power has sown new flesh, and an unwedded woman has conceived God, Christ — a man from a mortal mother, yet deity with the Father. Thence all flesh that conceives him is now divine, and takes on the nature of the partner God by a covenant.
For indeed the Word made flesh did not cease to be what it had been, the Word, while it joins to itself the use of the flesh — its majesty indeed not degenerating through the use of the flesh, but drawing wretched men to nobler things. He remains what he always was, beginning to be what he was not; we are no longer what we were, increased for the better in our birth: he conferred on me, and remained to himself. Nor did God diminish his own from ours, but while he bestowed his own upon ours, he raised us to heavenly gifts. These are the gifts: that you lie conquered, filthy Lust, nor after Mary are you able to break through my rights. You are the prince to the path of death, you the gate of doom; defiling bodies, you plunge souls into hell. Hide your head in the gloomy abyss, now a cold plague; perish, you harlot;
seek the shades, be shut up in Avernus, and be thrust down into the dark depths of night. Let the fiery waters roll you beneath, let black waters and a sulphurous whirlpool wheel you through resounding pools, and no longer, greatest of the furies, tempt the worshippers of Christ, that their bodies, cleansed, may be kept for their King.' She had spoken these words, and Chastity, glad at the death of slain Lust, washed in the waves of the Jordan her sword stained, to which the gore had clung with reddening dew and had defiled the gleaming steel with the wound. So, instructed by the river-laver, the victress cleanses her victorious blade, abolishing by baptism the stain of the enemy's throat;
and not now content to lay the cleansed sword within its scabbard, lest sheltered rust seize with rough filth the brightness she had washed, she consecrates it in a catholic temple at the altar of the divine font, where it may gleam and flash with eternal light. Behold, modest Patience stood with grave countenance, unmoved through the midst of the battle-lines and the varied tumults, and she watched the wounds and the vital parts pierced by the rigid spears, her eyes fixed, and waited, unhurried. Her from afar swelling Anger, hot with foaming jaws, twisting her bloodshot eyes suffused with gall, provokes with weapon and with voice as one outside the war, and, impatient of delay, attacks her with a pole, rails at her with her mouth, shaking the shaggy crests on her helmeted head.
'Lo, here for you, free spectator of our war,' she says, 'receive the death-bearing steel in your untroubled breast, and do not grieve, since it is shameful for you to have groaned at pain.' So she speaks, and the whistling pine-shaft follows her taunts, quivering through the soft breezes, and is borne sure beneath her very stomach, and is dashed against her with a straight stroke; but it rebounds, struck back by the hard repulse of the breastplate. For provident Virtue had clothed her shoulders with a triple-woven cuirass of locked adamant, and had joined on every side scaly textures of iron through the twisted sinews. Thence Patience remains at peace, strong against all the storms of weapons and enduring, impenetrable. Nor is she moved by the javelin of the monster raging beyond all custom, awaiting Anger as one to perish by her own strength.
Indeed, after the barbarian warrioress had spent her untamed arms in her fuming, and with a cloud of javelins had wearied in vain her useless right hand, when the windy weapons had fallen in light flight and the broken shafts lay with empty casts, her wicked hand turns to the hilt, and with the gleaming sword her right arm, straining for the blow, is raised high from her ear, and, balanced, strikes the middle of the brain. But the bronze helmet, formed of tempered metal, when struck rings out and blunts the rebounding edge, hard, and the rebellious blade also breaks its vein, dashed against it, while, not knowing how to yield, it receives the empty assaults of the striker and, safe, resists.
Anger, when she saw the fragments of her broken-off point and the sword shattered into pieces far off, with her hand now holding the hilt without the weight of the blade, out of her mind, casts away the wretched ivory and the perfidious tokens of her shameful adornment, and spurns far off the sad memorials, and, frenzied, is inflamed for her own destruction. From among the many missiles she had scattered in vain, she takes one from the dust of the field for perverse uses: she fixes the smoothed wood in the ground, and with the point turned upward pierces herself through and passes the lung with a hot wound. Patience, standing over her, says: 'We have conquered, exulting over Vice with our wonted virtue, without any peril of blood or life; our law holds this kind of warfare, to extinguish the furies and all the soldiery of evils and their raging forces by enduring.
Madness is its own enemy, and by raging it destroys itself; fiery Anger dies by her own weapons.' Having spoken thus, she cuts unharmed through the midst of the cohorts, accompanied by a noble man; for next to her had clung Job, in the hard wars of the unconquered mistress, his brow still stern and panting with much carnage, but now, his savage ulcers closed, smiling with grim face, and reckoning through the number of his scars the thousands of battles he had sweated, his own rewards, the enemy's disgrace. The goddess bids him at last rest from all the din of arms, and multiply with new wealth all that he had lost, and bring back things now no longer to perish. She herself breaks the masses of the legions and the converging columns, advancing untouched through wound-bearing showers.
She is associated as the one companion to all the virtues, and brave Patience mingles her aid. No virtue enters the doubtful struggle without that virtue, for she is a widow whom Patience does not strengthen. By chance, puffed-up Pride flew about through the scattered squadrons on an unbridled horse, which she had covered with a lion's skin and burdened its strong shoulders with shaggy hair, that, supported on its mane, she might bear herself the more boastfully, looking down with swelling haughtiness upon the throng of beasts. She had heaped her turreted head high with twisted tresses, that the added pile might increase the built-up curls, and her lofty brow might carry a towering crest. From her shoulders a linen mantle, gathered at the top into a fold, came together, knotting a smooth knot from her breast. A fringe flowing from her neck in a thin veil catches the hostile breezes in its swelling weave.
No less does the steed exult in unstable fierceness, impatient to have its mouth bridled with the dripping bit. Gnashing this way and that, it turns its back, freedom of flight denied, and swells under the pressed reins. Displaying herself in this guise, the windy virago towers above between the two battle-lines, and wheels her caparisoned horse about, and with face and voice threatens, gazing toward the opposing wedge which Humble Mind had gathered for war with scanty soldiery and poor arms — a queen indeed, but in need of another's aid, and not sufficiently trusting in her own equipment. She had joined Hope to herself as an ally, whose wealth, brought forth and suspended from the ground, lies in a rich kingdom.
So when frenzied Pride beholds Humility of Mind, armed with mean weapons and making no proud display, she pours herself out in voice with bitter words: 'Are you not ashamed, O wretches, to assail with your plebeian soldiery our illustrious leaders, and to provoke with the sword a race renowned for its titles—a people for whom martial valour has begotten ancient riches and granted, by its dominion, to tread upon the joyous grassy hills? Now a naked newcomer strives, if such a thing be lawful, to drive out the ancient kings! Behold those who would have our sceptres yield as plunder to their right hands! Behold those who strive to plough our fallow fields and to ravage with an alien plough the croplands won by our hand, and to drive out the hardy settlers by force of war!'
Surely, O laughable rabble, in the very hour of birth we embrace the whole man and the warm limbs fresh from the mother, and we scatter the force of our powers through the limbs of the new-born nursling, and we all hold dominion over the tender bones. What place was then granted to you in our seat, when our realms grew up together with the dominions born with us, in equal strength? Born under one and the same light, both house and lords, we came of age in equal years, ever since the new creature, going forth from the enclosed boundary of paradise, fled away into the wide world, and venerable Adam took on garments of skin—still naked, had he but followed our precepts. Who then is this enemy that now arises from unknown shores, troublesome, sluggish, unlucky, degenerate, mad, who claims for himself so late a right, an exile until now?
No doubt the trifles of an empty rumour will be believed, which bids the wretched at some time to long for the hope perhaps of a good to come, that lingering consolations may soothe their soft sloth with idle musing on things. Why should not idle hope soothe those whom in this dust Bellona does not rouse as recruits with her fierce trumpet, and whose unwarlike spirits a lukewarm virtue dissolves? Is the cold liver of Chastity of any use in war? Or is the tender work of Piety made to sweat in arms?
How ashamed I am, O Mars and conscious Valour, to stand against such a battle-line and to provoke trifles with the sword, and to match my right hand against bands of maidens—where ever stand needy Justice and poor Honesty, parched Sobriety, Fasting with pale face, Modesty diffused with scarcely a thin trace of blood, open Simplicity laid bare to every wound without covering, and Humble Mind, prostrate on the ground and not free even before the judgment-seat of her own conscience, whom trembling betrays as degenerate! I shall see to it that this feeble band is trodden underfoot like stubble!
For we do not deign to shatter them with hard swords, nor to stain our steel with chilling blood, nor to defile heroes with a cheap triumph.' Thus crying out, she urges her swift hoofed steed with the spurs and flies headlong with loosened reins, rash, eager to lay low the humble foe with the thrust of her horse's boss and to trample down the overthrown ruin. But she falls headlong into a pit, which by chance crafty Deceit had secretly dug, cutting through the level ground—Deceit, one of the detestable plagues among the Vices, a cunning craftswoman of beguiling, who, foreseeing the battle, had marred the plain with treacherous trenches while lurking on the enemy's side, that the ditch might catch the rushing squadrons and devour the sunken battalions.
And lest a wary band might detect the treacherous pit, she had covered its edges with branches and feigned the field with turf laid over. But the humble queen, though unaware, remained in a farther place, and had not yet come to Deceit's covered snare, nor trodden upon the hidden traps of the malignant ditch. This trick that horsewoman, while she is borne in headlong course, stumbled into, and suddenly laid open the blind chasm. Headlong she is rolled over the neck of the falling horse, and beneath the press of its breast she is whirled, her legs broken between. But Virtue, of calm self-control, when she sees the lightness of the monster crushed and lying beneath its own death, advances her step with moderation, and even raises her face but sparingly, and tempers her joy with a gentle countenance.
To her as she hesitates, faithful Hope, her companion, runs to aid and offers an avenging sword and inspires the love of praise. She, seizing the bloodied foe by the hair, drags her forth, and with her left hand pulling back the face, lays it bare; then, as the bowed neck of the suppliant pleads, she severs the head and snatches it up, and hangs the throat by the dripping hair. With holy mouth Hope rebukes the slain Vice: 'Cease your great boasting; God breaks every proud thing. The mighty fall, the puffed-up burst, the swollen are crushed. Learn to lay aside your haughtiness, learn to beware the pit before your feet, whoever you are that threaten on high. The widely-known judgment of our Christ holds force: that the humble ascend the heights, and the fierce return to the depths. We have seen Goliath, dreadful in limb and spirit, fall by a feeble hand.
a boyish hand hurled against him with a whistle from the sling a little pebble, and pierced his transfixed forehead with a hollow wound. He, threatening, stiff, boastful, savage, bitter—while he swells unsubdued, while he seethes terrible, while he displays himself, while he frightens the breezes with his shield—having found out what the playthings of a tiny boy could do, that turbulent warrior succumbed to tender years. Then that boy, following the youthful bloom of virtue, stretched his flourishing spirit upward into my realms; for a sure dwelling is kept for me beneath the feet of the Almighty Lord, and the victors, with the stain of their faults slain away, lay hold of me as I call them on high.' She spoke, and grazing the air with gilded wings, the maiden snatches herself up into heaven.
The Virtues marvel at her as she goes and lift up their spirits, willing to go together into prayers, did not earthly battles delay the leaders. They clash with the Vices and keep themselves for their own rewards. From the western bounds of the world had come the foe Luxury, long since prodigal of her ruined reputation, her hair perfumed, wandering with her eyes, languid in voice, lost in delights, for whom the cause of life was pleasure—to soften the unmanly soul, wantonly to drain pleasant allurements, and to loosen the unstrung senses. And then, sated, she belched up the all-night banquet, because by chance, lying near the dishes at dawn, she had heard the hoarse trumpets, and thereupon, leaving her warm cups, with steps tottering through wine and balsam, drunk, she went to war over trampled flowers.
Yet she came not on foot, but borne in a graceful chariot, and captured the wounded hearts of the marvelling men. O strange manner of fighting! No winged arrow flies struck from the bowstring, no whizzing lance darts forth from the twisted thong, nor does the right hand threaten with a javelin; but wantonly she casts violets and fights with rose-petals and scatters baskets of flowers among the hostile ranks. Thereupon, as the Virtues are charmed, the enticing breath breathes a tender poison through their weakened bones, and the wickedly sweet odour subdues mouths and breasts and arms, and soothes the iron-clad limbs, their strength shattered.
They cast down their spirits as if conquered and lay aside their darts, shamefully—alas!—their right hands grown limp, stupefied, while they marvel at the chariot glittering with the varied light of gems, while they gaze open-mouthed with fixed eyes at the reins crackling with thin gold-leaf and the axle of precious weight made of solid gold, and the row of spokes whitening with silver, which the outermost curve of the wheels encloses with a rim of pale electrum. And now the whole battle-line, treacherous, was passing of its own accord into love of surrender, the standards turned, willing to serve Luxury and to suffer the laws of their flowing mistress and to be held by the loose rule of gluttony. Sobriety, the most valiant Virtue, groaned at so sad a crime—that her comrades withdrew from the right wing, and that the once-invincible band perished without a blow.
The lofty standard of the Cross, which the good leader had borne in the foremost rank, she plants with its point fixed firm, and rallies the wavering wing with biting words, goading their spirits now with reproaches, now with prayer mingled in: 'What madness drives your senseless minds in darkness? Whither do you rush? To whom do you give your necks? What chains, at last—for shame!—does love delight to endure on warrior arms: lilies gleaming amid yellow garlands and garlands blooming with rust-coloured flower?
Does it please these to hand over to bonds the palms now accustomed to war, to bind their stiff arms in knots, that a gilded turban, confining their manly hair, may soak up the spikenard poured on in a saffron band—after the seals of oil inscribed on the brow, by which the royal unguent was given and the eternal chrism—that the soft gait may sweep the footprints with a trailing robe, and silken cloaks float about their effeminate limbs—after the immortal tunic which with skilled finger nurturing Faith had woven, granting an impenetrable covering to washed breasts, to whom she herself had granted to be born again—and thence on to nocturnal feasts, where the huge goblet spits forth the foaming losses of poured Falernian onto the table with dripping ladles, where the couches are moist with much wine and the embossed cups are wetted with old liquor?
Has the thirst of the desert then fallen from your minds, has that fountain fallen from memory, given to the fathers from the rock, which the mystic rod drew forth leaping from the summit of the cleft stone? Did the angelic food flow into your ancestors' first tents—the manna which now in a later, happier age the evening people eats of the body of Christ? You, steeped in these banquets, foul drunkenness now hurries off, importunate, to the soaking brothel of Luxury—you, whom neither raging Wrath nor idols had compelled to yield in war, a drunken dancing-girl has bent! Stand fast, I pray, mindful of yourselves, mindful also of Christ. It befits you to remember what your tribe is, what your glory, who is your God and King, who your Lord. You came from the noble seed of Judah, by a long line of nobles, even down to the Mother of God, by whom God himself was made man.
Let the most celebrated glory of David rouse your noble minds—glory trained in the unceasing cares of wars; let Samuel too rouse you, who forbids the spoil to be handled taken from a wealthy foe, and does not suffer the conquered king to live uncircumcised, lest the surviving prey summon the gentle victor to renewed battles. He counts it a crime now to spare the captive tyrant, but for you, on the contrary, your wish is to be conquered and to succumb. Repent—if any reverence for the supreme Godhead moves you—of having willed by abominable betrayal to pursue this so sweet evil; if you repent, the error does no harm. Jonathan repented of having violated his sober fast with sweet honeycomb, the taste of sceptre and of honey alas too badly tasted, while the alluring pleasure of kingship delighted the youth and dissolved his sworn vows.
But what though he repented—neither is that lot to be wept over, nor does a savage sentence stain the ancestral axes. Lo, I, Sobriety, if you are prepared to join in spirit, throw open the way to all the Virtues, that ill-counselling Luxury, thronged by her many attendants, may pay the penalty with her whole legion under Christ the Judge.' So having spoken, she presents the Cross of the Lord to the seething four-horse team coming against her, thrusting the venerable wood against the very bridles. And when the fierce steeds took fright at it, gleaming with its outspread horns and at the top of its front, they turn their headlong flight in blind dread, routed over the precipices. The charioteer is carried backward, vainly pulling at the reins, and her dripping hair is fouled with dust. Then too the whirl of the wheels entangles the mistress thrown out;
for she slips face-down beneath the axle and slows the chariot with her torn body acting as a drag. Sobriety adds a deadly wound to her as she lies, hurling a millstone of rock from the cliff-side. And since chance offered this blow to the standard-bearer, who carried no missiles in her hand but the emblem of war, accident drives the stone, so that it shattered the breath of her open mouth and crushed her lips into her hollow palate. With her teeth loosened inward, her tongue, torn and mangled, fills her severed gullet with bloody fragments. Her throat grows raw with the unwonted feast, and devouring her melted bones, she vomits up again the morsels she had swallowed. 'Drink now your own blood after your many cups,' the maiden says in rebuke, 'let these be at last your dishes—grim, in payment for the over-sweet things of your past life.
The last taste roughens the wanton allurements of life with a draught of bitter death and a horrifying drink.' At the slaughter of their leader, the trifling battle-line fled scattered in trembling terror. Jest and Wantonness first throw away their cymbals; for they had been playing at war with such weapons, rehearsing wounds with a resounding rattle. Fleeing, Love turns his back, and pale with fear himself leaves behind in his own tracks his poison-smeared darts and the bow slipped from his shoulders and the falling quiver. Pomp, the displayer of empty splendour, is stripped, laid bare of her vain robe; the garlands of Charm are torn and dragged off, and the gold of her neck and head is loosened, and jarring Discord throws the gems into confusion. It does not grieve Pleasure to go with worn feet through the sharp brambles, since a greater force compels her to endure the bitter flight;
the dread of peril hardens her tender soles for the tormenting road. Wherever the fleeing band carries itself in fearful courses, losses lie strewn: the hair-pin, the bands, the fillets, the brooch, the bridal veil, the breast-band, the diadem, the necklace. From these and from all the spoils of Sobriety the soldier of Sobriety abstains, and tramples down the accursed scandals with chaste feet, nor with brow consenting does he turn his stern eyes toward the joys of plunder. Avarice is borne along, girt with a capacious bosom, snatching up with hooked hand whatever precious thing devouring Luxury had left behind, gaping with vast mouth after the beautiful baubles and gathering up the fragments of falling gold among the heaps of sand. Nor is it enough to have filled her ample folds;
it delights her to cram the base gain into her purses and to stretch the heavy bags with stolen goods, which she hides with concealing left hand and veils with the covering of her left side; for her swift right hand scrapes off the plunder and exercises her brazen nails upon the spoils. Care, Famine, Fear, Anxiety, Perjuries, Pallor, Corruption, Guile, Inventions, Sleeplessness, Squalor—the varied retinue of the monster—the Furies, are driven along. Nor any less meanwhile, in the manner of ravening wolves, do the Crimes leap about, ranging over the whole field, born from the black milk of their mother Avarice. If a brother-in-arms has seen his brother's helmet glitter with tawny thunderbolt-gems, he does not fear to draw his sword and to strike his comrade's head with the blade, about to snatch the gems from his kinsman's brow.