Though young, Mariamne was no foolish and inexperienced girl. Her life had been calculated to elicit and bring to perfection some of woman’s loftiest qualities. She had early learned the nobility of self‐sacrifice, the necessity of self‐reliance and self‐denial. Like the generality of her nation she possessed considerable pride of race; suppressed, indeed, and kept down by the exigencies in which the Jews had so often found themselves, but none the weaker nor the less cherished on that account. Notwithstanding his many chastisements and reverses,—from his pilgrimage through the wilderness to his different captivities by the great Oriental powers, and final subjection under Rome,—the Jew never forgot that he sprang from a stem more especially planted by the hand of the Almighty; that he could trace his lineage back, unbroken and unstained, to those who held converse with Moses under the shadow of Mount Sinai; nay, to the Patriarch himself, who held his authority direct from Heaven, and who was thought worthy to entertain angels at his tent door on the plains of Mamre. Such a conviction imparted a secret pride to every one of his descendants. Man, woman, and child, were persuaded that to them belonged of right the dominion of the earth.
It may be supposed that one of Eleazar’s disposition was not likely to bring up his family in any humble notions of their privileges and their importance. Mariamne had been early taught to consider her nationality as the first and dearest of her advantages; and, womanlike, she clung to it all the closer that her people had been forced to submit to the Roman yoke. Habits of patience, of reflection and endurance, had been engendered by the everyday life of the Jewish maiden, witnessing her father’s continued impatience of the existing state of things, and his energetic, though secret, efforts to change the destinies of his countrymen; whilst all that such an education might have created of hard, cunning, and unfeminine in his daughter’s mind, the society and counsels of Calchas were eminently qualified to counteract. Losing no opportunity of sowing the good seed; of teaching, both by precept and example, the lessons he had learned from those who had them direct from the Fountain‐head; it was impossible to remain long uninfluenced by the constant kindliness and gentle bearing of one who understood Christianity to signify, not only faith, and purity, and devotion even to the death, but also that peace and goodwill amongst men, which its first teachers inculcated as its fundamental principle and essential element. Calchas, indeed, lacked not the fiery energy and the tameless instincts of his race. His nature, perhaps, was originally fierce and warlike as his brother’s, but it had been subdued, softened, exalted by his religion; and, while his heart was pitiful and kindly, nothing remained of the warrior but his loyalty, his courage, and his zeal.