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Carthaginians had given theirs in that fatal siege when Cato said of Scipio, He only is a living man, and the rest are gliding shades"-these women had the true heroic spirit. And thus, in this hotbed of vice and crime, human nature vindicated itself, as it always does, and the righteous remnant was not wanting.

At the same time, the profligacy of the Ladies of Imperial Rome was verily appalling. The very courtesans were better. Flora, who would not be unfaithful to her lover without his consent; Fannia of Minturnæ, who, unlike Jael, received, comforted, and protected her old enemy Marius when, proscribed and a fugitive, he was sent by the authorities to her to be quietly despatched; the stately Chione; Cynthea and Lesbiathese were less corrupt than the ladies who practised their vices and lived their lives without a professional excuse. Even a Benedicta," red with her bath of criminal blood, was no vainer if a trifle more loathsome than Poppaa, with her bath of asses' milk; and the frantic luxury of the meretrix was met by the gold-shod mules of the Empress.

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Their greed, too, was as monstrous as their lust. The younger Faustina made Marcus Aurelius, good and noble as he was, the ideal Stoic, the supreme philosopher, declare Matidia's will void for the sake of a costly string of pearls-the crimes that have been born of strings of pearls!-which had been left to Matidia's foster child, but which the Empress coveted. This spoliation of a helpless child, by the way, was a curious commentary on the foundation of the Faustinian Institute for orphan girls. Also, it a little blemishes the sweet picture of the father's love for his own "domnula," seeing that he could act so unrighteously by the child of another. Worse, however, than this was the awful crime of Pontia, whose tomb set forth her sin, how that she had poisoned her two sons for their money, and then having so much grace of consciencehad done away with herself. But, indeed, these two things have always gone together and always must; and wherever we find licentiousness we find also greed and cruelty. And the Roman Ladies, in the glittering days of their degrada tion-when society shone with the phos

phorescent light of putrefaction-knew but little distinction between the three gods they served: Love of money, Cruelty, and Lust. Their lives were spent in the service of this baleful Trinity, and they had lost the very meaning of those nobler deities who ruled the family and the Senate in bygone days. Their home was the place which knew them least, and its duties were those they had most completely abandoned. Of mistresshood they retained only its tyranny, of command only its cruelty. Worse than the slave-drivers of America, they tortured, for the most trivial faults or for none at all, the hapless wretches given into their cruel keeping. Their beauty, their lovers, their pleasures, their excitements, were all they lived for, and they cared not how many victims these cost.

Borne in their luxurious litters, their fine, "smooth," pale-colored garments lying in soft folds about their limbs ; their jewels sparkling in the light; their large, bold eyes blackened on the lids; their dark hair dyed to golden; their faces painted like an Eastern bride's; -we see them as they lie back among their gorgeous cushions, the cruellest and most wanton women of antiquitywomen who distanced even the worst of the Greek hetaire. The quiet stateliness of old-time dignity had passed into the languor of voluptuousness, as the energy which made a Ciclia, a Valeria, had given place to the unrest of insatiety. Their heavy-lidded eyes look curiously at the passers-by as they gaze through the transparent windows which show more than they reveal. And yet they reveal enough. Their full-curved lips smile, but without tenderness-smile as conquerors smile-as they meet some famous singer like Chrysogonus; some athlete or some actor, such as the noblyborn Hispulla was known to love as it were en masse; some gladiator, like that brutal Sergius for whom Hippia left her husband and earned the renown of eter nal infamy. Their faces, pale with the pallor of passion, flush as they stop their litters and talk in whispers of plainest meaning with him who is the fancy of the hour-one of those low-born men whose personal beauty or professional notoriety has exalted to the perilous place of honor in those fluid desires it

were sacrilege to call affections. And herein lies the secret of the intense corruption of these women :-Proud and masterful, arrogant and unbridled, they took their lovers for their own pleasures, they did not give themselves for love. Hence these low-born notorieties were the chosen favorites of the haughty patrician ladies, being taken-themselves unwooing-and bought by the women who were, in a double sense, their mistresses. The warm Roman sun shines on these patrician harlots as they talk to their dishonored lovers; and the soft Roman air brings from the gardens of the Campagna rich scents of violet or hyacinth, of myrtle or orange, of rose or narcissus, of ripening fruit or dying vineleaves, which stimulate their senses and feed their avid thoughts. And then, the meeting planned and the password exchanged, they go on through the narrow streets to the Colosseum where, perhaps, those strange mad folk called Christians are to feed the lions to-day; or, haply, that brazen hussy, Mævia, is to fight with a Tuscan boar; or only the ordinary troop of slaves and gladiators -among whom are lovers, once held and now discarded, whose death will be all the more exciting for the memories of the past are to be butchered for this Roman holiday. What a murmur of fierce expectation stirs the assembled crowd, like the wind among the aspens, as the Destined come in, raising their weapons as they group themselves before the imperial seat, with that mournful cry of servile degradation: "Ave, Cæsar! Morituri te salutant !"-the Vestals sitting by, unmoved save to rejoicing. save to rejoicing. When the trumpet sounds after the first sham show has been gone through, and the real business of the day begins, how those languid, heavy-lidded eyes open wide and blaze with hungry fire! how the mobile nostrils dilate as they scent the coming reek of blood! And when the fatal cast has been made, and the poor fish-crested mirmillo is entangled in the net, while the retiarius has his trident raised for the fatal blow-when the conquered lifts his hand and prays the people for his life, while the victor waits for the determining sign-how their eager faces press forward above the bearded throng-their hearts wildly beating, their white bosoms heaving,

their nervous hands tightly clenched, with the cruel thumbs turned up, and their shrill voices, sharpened to a scream, crying out, "Habet ! habet! hoc habet!" Better than the delirious secrets of the Mysteries-sweeter than the love of singer or of athlete is this satisfying carnival of blood. Christian men and women-wives, maidens, and mothers; lovers and fathers and husbandsfor their impiety to the gods justly sacrificed to the wild beasts, which tear them limb from limb and toss the bleeding fragments on the reddened sand :what shouts of wild hysteric laughter, what thunders of applause drown their death cries and sing their requiem! And yet these Christians did no harm. They were skilful in magic, as Julia Domna and some others thought; but it was a magic that wrought no evil to man or beast. Only the rulers of the people feared their political ideas, as they had feared those of the Gracchi some generations before, and their virtues were that mute reproach which a vicious society never forgives.

But across the darkness of this impure night, the light of the new religion stole gradually nearer and nearer. If not nobler than the Stoic-if not so masculine nor so strong-it had in it a sweeter strain of tenderness, and the authority of personal revelation. It was emphatically in those days the Religion of Humanity. It touched the head of the slave and crowned him with the dignity of spiritual freedom; it raised the down-trodden to an equality before God with the rich and the noble. It preached the sublime doctrine of the Brotherhood of Man, and taught mercy and pity to people who had tortured their slaves as the young Domitian tortured flies, and turned them into the arena to fight, for no quarrel, till they died. It brought back to women the ennobling sentiment of chastity and the purifying influences of virtue. It bestowed on men a grander citizenship than they had had under such rulers as Commodus, Caracalla, Heliogabalus, and that swarm of base pretenders and transient chiefs who had dishonored the name and destroyed the spirit of old Rome. It substituted for the faith which had died a living Presence and a vitalized creed; and the world which had been drunk with blood and

ravaged by lust as by a plague, turned from its unclean orgies and accepted this new deliverance from sin. The leprosy which had eaten into the whole body politic was scourged out of it. The Saturnalia were over, and the day was not to see the offences of the night. So, step by step, the new faith gained on the retreating old faith, and settled in its waste places. The desecrated temples were reconsecrated; the dead gods were replaced under other names; their shrines, which had fallen to ruins, the fire on their altars which had burned out, were rebuilt and relit for the saints and martyrs who were their Christian successors. The mad hospitality of the Lectisternium was at an end-that seven days' sacrifice which even Marcus Aurelius led to appease the wrath of heaven, expressing itself in the great plague which devastated Italy after the Parthian War of 166.* No more feasts were made nor couches set, nor tables spread, for the hidden host of heaven, known and unknown, national and foreign, civilized and barbarian. The altar to the Unknown God shared the fate of the rest; and men began to ask in public what a few had already asked themselves in private: What were those beings whose recorded doings per plexed the devout reasoner, inasmuch as they taught a phantasmagoric morality, changed for the use of gods from the law laid on man?''

The gods were indeed phantoms as some said, demons as said others; and

* Capitolinus says the plague began in Babylon. According to his story, one of the Roman soldiers who was in the Temple of Apollo in that city, happened to break open a golden cas

ket which he found there, and immediately there arose from it an exhalation tainted with the plague, which spread at once through Parthia and the entire world. The evil was in flicted by the gods as a retribution upon Avidius Cassius for having disregarded the oath, in reliance on which the citizens of Seleucia had admitted him within the walls. Ammianus Marcellinus says that one day the Romans searching for treasure in the temple at Seleucia discovered a narrow hole, from which they proceeded to remove the covering; "whereupon, from a deep gulf which the secret science of the Chaldeans had closed up, there issued a gust of wind impregnated with a fatal pestilence." These are more scientific reasons, by the way, than the "female figure" of the Middle Ages, sometimes met with in the night-the plague in Person.

the old faith had become of no more value than the ragged robe of a dead augur. When Diana, purest of all those divine beings who linked men to heaven by the golden chain of faith, could be represented by a courtesan-when emperors, such as the Cæsars, could be deified and a servile people could hold their images as sacred-when Faustina could have her temple and harlotry was no obstacle to canonization, it was time for the whole form to pass away. The essential spirit truly existed here and there among men who yet were considered atheists, and "Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum," was as true to the heart of man then as it is now. But the outer framework had to be reconstructed. The rotten beams and uprights had to be carted away for sounder wood to be put in their places. So, too, the disordered chamber of the home had to be purified and cleansed; and chief of all, the monstrous confusion and manifold pollutions which had made the marriage chamber but a licensed lupanar, had to be cleared away and the place set in decent order. Seneca had asked :-" Does anybody now blush at a divorce, since certain illustrious and noble names compute their years, not by the number of Consuls, but by the number of husbands they have had?" and Tertullian's famous. epigram epitomized the whole situation :

Divorce was now looked upon as one fruit of marriage." But now the laws of Constantine against adultery and unchastity were such as would have suited the Duke in Measure for Meas

ure.

The pendulum always beating in accurate rhythm-systole and diastole always according-marriage became not only sacred but indissoluble as a sacrament. If the Christian world dismissed the symbolism of the high bride-crown and flame-colored veil, the touch of white thornwood and the hair parted with a spear, the woollen thread wound about the door-posts, the mystic salted cake, the significance of the stola which no public meretrix could wear no more than a Scotch girl might wear the snood after she had pulled the bracken to her shame they retained the meaning of those archaic forms. And the home be came as pure as when those forms were sanctified and the tie was respected.

Helena took up the cause and cross of Christ, the crucified sophist," as Lucian calls him; and what an empress did the meaner folk repeated. The priests of the Temple became priests in the Church. The augurs fled into the desert as saints and hermits, and dreamed there their dreams and saw their visions, as they had once read the words of the gods in the portents of the sky and the entrails of the victims. The Vestal Virgins reappeared again as nuns, and the Sibylline books were exchanged for the Gospels and the Apocalypse. The luxurious Roman lady believed the new exponent who gave a tenderer significance to that old figure of Hermes carrying the sheep across his neck-to the festivals which marked the change of seasons-to the wine which had belonged to Bacchus-to the dove which had been Venus's, to the fish which had played about the tritons and the nereides, and which now symbolized both

The

baptism and the Saviour's name. wild orgies of Bacchus and the Syrian Astarte, the mysteries of Bona Dea, the impure secrets of the Temple, were exchanged for the mild rejoicing of the Agape and the presence of the Mother of God. For the bound and filleted Suovetaurilia came the bloodless sacrifice of the Eucharist, and for the hospitality of the Pantheon, with its open doors and welcome to all comers, the severe doctrine of the unity of God. So light shone for a few years, and then darkness settled down once more. The Religion of Love lost itself in the din of battle, when the Church fought for supremacy against the State, and the war was between fellow-Christians-when the cries of the wounded and the groans of the dying turned to a false promise those mysterious words which had announced “Peace on earth and good-will toward men.' Fortnightly Review.

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heads. text.

Yet there is usually only one If in this sermon in stones the proportion is otherwise-since it is pre

fixed, as it were, by a whole sheaf of texts it is because here one text can never suffice. "Music vibrates in the memory," as the spirit opens to the influences near, and verse after verse of poets new and old rushes to the mind; we seem to hear the rhythmic beat of English song, the surge and thunder of the Odyssey. And, moreover, Serk has especial poems of its own.

For the spell of ardent airs and immeasurable seas, of hollow shores round which the waters lie more divinely radiant than floors of beryl, of golden sunshine, and the sweet, bright-blossomed earth in springtime-the spell of all that is free and fair-is about us here. But above all is that strange irresistible fascination which islands have upon the spirit-sweet new land hung afar between sky and sea, filling us with a painful joy, causing our hearts to burn with a mighty longing-the yearning to be there, and to know, and be at rest.

But the dog, that is, my dog, is of an entirely different mind in these matters. Corrie is like the Frenchman who asked, with a praiseworthy repudiation of cant, "Aimez-vous les beautés de la nature? Pour moi, je les abhorre!" Or at least, like the poet Gray, she is much distressed and alarmed at beholding hundreds of feet of precipice above her, or a yawning chasm or huge hole going straight down two or three hundred feet below her nose into fathomless depths of murmuring surge. These things suggest nothing either pleasurable or poetical to her. She tries to sit down on the securest spot, uttering gentle moans and deprecating whistles of distress; and however loyally she follows, no matter how great the dangers she sees so clearly before her, her appreciation of such "beauties of nature" is always greatly enhanced when she beholds as few of them as possible, and when, marching on the secure earth, she has a satisfactory sense that neither she nor her mistress will fall down over some cliff that "looks fearfully in the confinéd deep, or else be crushed by tons of rock from overhead. She is not, I fear, even purged by pity and terror. Her taste in the matter of the picturesque is still. the taste' of a hundred and fifty years ago, the age of grottoes and the clipping of yew-trees, of artificial cas

cades that flowed to the magic sound of flutes, and of cows that yielded syllabub in at Horace Walpole's drawing-room window.

The shifting fashion of art or taste, the change in the eye for certain aspects in landscape, or in the ear for certain modes, is a matter on which I need not enter here; though it is a curious if not an important psychological phenomenon. It is enough that these things too are subject to change. I once met a degenerate Scotchman who admired the flatness of the flat country, in comparison with those troublesome mountains ; for the prospect, if not of fishes, then of loaves, we must imagine. But Scots with souls so dead are rare in this latter end of the nineteenth century, and it is only fair when we mention Gray's affright at finding himself standing under big rocks in the Lake country, to remember that with all his town-bred attitude toward it, he was one of the first English poets of the eighteenth century, if not the first, who discovered the "romantic" in nature, who saw beauty in that of which he was more than half afraid. As late as 1773 Dr. Johnson made his famous tour to the Hebrides. To those who know and love Loch Coruisk and the Cuchullins his description of Skye may well be a marvel, while his idea of the islands in Loch Lomond was to employ upon them all the arts of embellishment!" But as it is," he cries, "the islets which court the gazer at a distance disgust him at his approach, when he finds, instead of soft lawns and shady thickets, nothing more than uncultivated ruggedness." No doubt Dr. Johnson sat in darkness.

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Men bred in the universities of Scotland cannot be expected to be often decorated with the splendors of ornamental erudition," is the appalling view he takes in Glasgow, at the moment when Burns, a boy of fourteen, was following the plough-tail, as it were within speaking distance; a student in that larger universe which has become our school too as it never was the old Doctor's. Beethoven was three years old, so was Wordsworth. Coleridge was a year old, Sir Walter Scott was two. Turner was not born at all till two years later. We can hardly imagine a journey to Scotland before the "Lady of the Lake,'