Thus perished the great Triumvir, dying like a Roman, whose blinded but persistent love, whatever were its elements, ever shall make his name memorable. All the ages will point to him as a man who gave the world away for the caresses of a woman, and a woman who deceived and ruined him.

As for her, this selfish, heartless sorceress, gifted and beautiful as she was, what does she do when she sees her lover dead, - dying for her? Does she share his fate? Not she. What selfish woman ever killed herself for love?

"Some natural tears she shed, but wiped them soon."

She may have torn her clothes, and beaten her breast, and disfigured her face, and given vent to mourning and lamentations. But she does not seek death, nor surrender herself to grief, nor court despair. She renews her strength. She reserves her arts for another victim. She hopes to win Octavius as she had won Julius and Antony; for she was only thirty-nine, and still a queen. And for what? That she might retain her own sovereignty, or the independence of Egypt, still the most fertile of countries, rich, splendid,

and with grand traditions which went back thousands of years; the oldest, and once the most powerful of monarchies. Her love was ever subservient to her interests. Antony gave up ambition for love,-whatever that love was. It took possession of his whole being, not pure and tender, but powerful, strange; doubtless a mad infatuation, and perhaps something more, since it never passed away, -admiration allied with desire, the worship of dazzling gifts, though not of moral virtues. Would such a love have been permanent? Probably not, since the object of it did not shine in the beauty of the soul, but rather in the graces and adornments of the body, intensified indeed by the lustre of bewitching social qualities and the brightness of a cultivated intellect. It is hard to analyze a passionate love between highly gifted people who have an intense development of both the higher and the lower natures, and still more difficult when the idol is a Venus Polyhymnia rather than a Venus Urania. But the love of Antony, whether unwise, or mysterious, or unfortunate, was not feigned or forced: it was real, and it was irresistible; he could not help it. He was enslaved, bound hand and foot. His reason may have rallied to his support, but his will was fettered. He may have had at times dark and gloomy suspicions, that he was played with, that he was cheated, that he would be deserted, that Cleopatra was false and

treacherous. And yet she reigned over him; he could not live without her. She was all in all to him, so long as the infatuation lasted; and it had lasted fourteen years, with increasing force, in spite of duty and pressing labors, the calls of ambition and the lust of power. In this consuming and abandoned passion, for fourteen years, so strange and inglorious, and for a woman so unworthy, even if he were no better than she, we see one of the great mysteries of our com- \ plex nature, not uncommon, but insoluble.

I have no respect for Antony, and but little admiration. I speak of such mad infatuation as a humiliating exhibition of human weakness. Any one under its fearful spell is an object of pity. But I have more sympathy for him than for Cleopatra, although she was doubtless a very gifted woman. He was her victim; she was not his. If extravagant and reckless and sensual, he was frank, generous, eloquent, brave, and true to her. She was artful, designing, and selfish, and used him for her own. ends, although we do not know that she was perfidious and false to him. But for her he would have ruled the world. He showed himself capable of an enormous sacrifice. She made no sacrifices for him. She could even have transferred her affections, since she afterwards sought to play her blandishments upon his rival. Conceive of Antony, if you can, as loving any one else than her who led him on to ruin. In the very de

gradation of love we see its sacredness. In his fidelity we find some palliation. Nor does it seem that Octavia, the slighted wife of Antony, gave way to vengeance. Her sense of injury was overshadowed by her pity. This lofty and dignified matron even took his six surviving children, three of whom were Cleopatra's, and brought them up in her own house as her own. Can Paganism show a greater magnanimity?

The fate of Cleopatra was tragic also. She too destroyed herself, not probably by the bite of asps, as is the popular opinion, but by some potent and subtile poison that she ever carried with her, and which had the effect of benumbing the body and making her insensible to pain. Yet she does not kill herself because she cannot survive the death of Antony, but because she is too proud to be carried to Rome to grace the triumph of the new Cæsar. She will not be led a captive princess up the Capitoline Hill. She has an overbearing pride. "Know, sir," says she to Proculeius, "that I

"Will not wait pinion'd at your master's court,
Nor once be chastis'd with the sober eye

Of dull Octavia. . . .

. . . Rather a ditch in Egypt

Be gentle grave to me!"

But whether pride or whether shame was the more powerful motive in committing suicide, I do not read

that she was a victim of remorse.

sense. Nor did she give way to sentimental grief on

She had no moral

Her grief was blended with

Nor did she hide her head, She used all her arts to win

the death of Antony. disappointment and rage. but wore a face of brass. Octavius. Her resources did not fail her; but she expended them on one of the coldest, most politic, and most astute men that ever lived. And the disappointment that followed her defeat

that she could

not enslave another conqueror was greater than the grief for Antony. Nor during her whole career do we see any signs of that sorrow and humility which, it would seem, should mark a woman who has made so great and fatal a mistake, cut off hopelessly from the respect of the world and the peace of her own soul. We see grief, rage, despair, in her miserable end, as we see pride and shamefacedness in her gilded life, but not remorse or shame. And when she dies by her own hand, it is not in madness, but to escape humiliation. Suicide was one of the worst features of Pagan antiquity. It was a base and cowardly reluctance to meet the evils of life, as much as indifference to the future and a blunted moral sense.

So much for the woman herself, her selfish spirit, her vile career; but as Cleopatra is one of the best known and most striking examples of a Pagan woman, with qualities and in circumstances peculiarly characteristic