of meat was set for him on the terrace in front of the house; but he paid a dilettante attention to the victuals, occupying himself chiefly with a scrutiny of the house and his new surroundings, while on his side he was the cynosure of the eyes of all the family gazing at the new pet from the drawing-room windows. Other pets of the house were three very large black cats, great favourites, immensely spoiled, and very dignified and lazy. As we regarded As we regarded the antipodean somewhat scornfully dallying with his dinner, we saw one of these solemn black monsters advancing at its usual dignified pace towards him. A cry arose from the assembled family, "Oh, Tigris will kill the magpie!" The head of the family desired to await developments.

There

was a painful suspense of breath, as we watched the shaggy black Persian advancing on the plate and the magpie with a steady, unhurried step. The magpie stood aside from the plate, and, with head well on one side, watched the on-coming robber. There was a world of meaning in the glance of that wicked gray eye, but it was all lost on the dignified composure of the Persian who, without deigning to look at the magpie, proceeded to sniff at the contents of the plate. The bird, motionless as a statue, waited till the black whiskers came inquiringly over the edge of the plate; then he made one sudden hop, lunged once, with a lightning stroke of his beak, at the beautiful glossy black muzzle, and was back again in his watchful attitude so quickly that one almost felt disposed to doubt if he had ever left it. was no doubt in the mind of the cat. That lightning stroke of the beak had much the same effect on the Persian as if a bomb had burst somewhere in its middle. It leaped with a yell five paces backward, its legs extended, every separate hair of its long fur standing off it at full length. No. 427.-VOL. LXXII.

There

When it reached the ground it hesitated not for one moment; no fleeting notion of vengeance crossed its mind; with head and tail depressed, in manner as unlike as possible to its dignified approach, it retreated at a good round trot to the shrubbery whence it had come. The magpie slowly relaxed its attentive aspect, and as it addressed itself once more to the plate of viands there were those among the spectators at the window who were ready to aver most solemnly that they saw it wink. The comedy was not yet finished. Before our laughter at the discomfiture of Tigris had died away, a second Persian, Darius, emerged from the shrubbery in the same stately fashion. The bird at once resumed the statuesque pose. In the same manner as before, the cat advanced; the bird repeated its tactics with the same triumphant results; and within two minutes of its first advance the cat was retreating with undignified haste to recover its composure in the haven of the shrubbery. There was yet another act. The third cat came on the scene, approached the plate, met with a like reception; and he too rejoined his stricken companions in the laurels. It was evident that the cats had played the game in the spirit of those who go into a "Hoax Exhibition" at a charitable bazaar, the first comers revealing nothing to those who follow them of the nature of the entertainment which they will find within.

From this day forth, however, the Australian magpie was headman of all the pets on the premises, and none dared interfere with him any more. His first success encouraged him to further triumphs. He used to lie in wait, screwed up in a corner, on the stone steps by which the nursemaids, with the children, descended the terrace. As they stepped past him he would dash out, with a bark like a

E

dog (though we believe the native Australian dingo is voiceless) and, with a dab of his vicious beak on the unprotected ankles of the maids, so frighten them that they almost dropped the babies. This was his favourite pastime, until he had established so complete a reign of terror that this part at least of his occupation was gone. His crowning impudence, however,

was exhibited when the regimental band of the neighbouring garrison came over to play at a gardenparty. The soldiers, arranged in the usual circle, were discoursing popular airs under the conduct of a glorious individual who beat time very impressively in the centre. The display of martial bravery should have been sufficient to inspire reverence in any

one, most of all, as might have been thought, in a colonist. The magpie, however, utterly unimpressed, crept between the legs of the cornet-à-piston, and, taking a position within the circle opposite to the bandmaster, began mimicking his rather pompous gestures with so ludicrously successful a caricature that the gallant tune came to an untimely end in the uncontrollable laughter of the performers. This was

his last great effort. His talent for practical joking brought him into so much disfavour that, chiefly through the petticoated influence of the nursery, he was expelled as remorselessly as any other anarchist; and his genius now finds fewer opportunities in the less congenial atmosphere of the Zoological Gardens.

51

WHEN Charles Lamb dismissed the dictionary as biblion a-biblion, he perhaps forgot how to read it aright. For the long rows of words defiling in order by the letter under which they enlisted, have to a more curious or sympathetic eye not the mere majesty of procession alone, but an interest as individuals in society, with all their resulting incongruities and amenities. There is something strangely human in these regiments of the line; and it needs no very elastic fancy to imagine them composed of living beings, with thoughts and feelings of their own. Given the fancy, imagination runs riot. Pride of caste, heartburnings of self-manufacture, ambition for social success-to win the entrée of a poem of Tennyson, for instance, in the days when he held open house,— might not these be with words even as they are with men? And a little apart from the hurrying, struggling throng, with its jostlings and its jealousies, where words are really, as Archbishop Trench called them, "living forces," may we not see some lonelier and more leisurely figures, doing homely work for a modest wage, but wearing, in the quiet dignity and self-sufficiency of their retirement, the legible memory of better days? Such a word in such a world is Piety.

Piety, holiest Piety, as one votary hails her, comes of an honourable Roman stock, so ancient that its beginning is hidden in obscurity. A genealogist, with his pedantry kindled to enthusiasm and his ingenuity touched with rashness, might find in the old Greek letter π (pi) the primitive father of its derivative pius, tracing from the two-legged firmness and upright

ness of the parent letter the qualities which the word denotes. But leaving these curious speculations to the Heralds' Office department of philology, let us rather confine ourselves to historic times and deeds. Here Piety, nurtured on Roman soil, appears as the national virtue of the Romans. What "the Beautiful in the Good" was to the Greece of Plato, such was Piety to Virgil's Rome, and as an ideal of conduct it may still be studied.

It was a tangible enough ideal to the dissolute Augustus Cæsar, nephew of the Cæsar, eponym of emperors, though never Emperor himself, and to his vain premier, Mæcenas, eponym of patrons to this day. For in the evil times upon which Rome fell after Brutus and Cassius had assassinated the man who was too great for them, times when wild-beast shows and public butcheries were the pastimes of the populace, when disbanded armies took their Capuan ease within the city, and eastern favourites with eastern manners ruled the court, the Emperor, who was a debauchee, and his minister, who was a fop, deliberately set themselves, by precept, if not by example, to reinstate the old religion in the new Rome. They made a calculated effort to restore Piety to her oblivious votaries, to realise the forgotten ideal of the simple, upright life which they had called pius. Such had been the life of that earlier generation, who had handled alternately the ploughshare and the sword. By "Piety and arms, they had made Rome great,

1

"1

Tantum ferro quantum pietate potentes Stamus.-PROPERTIUS, iv. 22.

but neither weapon could bear use in excess. So long as the use of arms did not unlearn the use of piety, which meant the "pure religion breathing household laws," and making the householder's common routine a succession of holy acts, so long Rome's greatness was secure. But when, as had happened now, Cincinnatus went out to the war, and died there, and bred a new race of soldiers far from his father's fields, then the use of piety was overborne by too much use of arms. And it is to this lapsed habit and balance of husbandry and fighting that we owe the attempt, unique in history, to restore the prestige of an abstract virtue.

Failure was a foregone conclusion. Rome had changed too much for any such act of restitution to succeed. Neither the fiat of an Emperor, nor the fashion of a patron, backed though they were by the most earnest sermon ever fashioned in poetic form, availed to arrest the course of history. Time, in its revolution, had pronounced the doom of Rome as inevitably as Roman Cato had pronounced the doom of Carthage. In the euphemism of the poet, "God had other thoughts;" but the poems remain a unique monument to a lost cause. The NEID of Virgil is the epic of Piety, written, as all literary epics must be, when the epoch which it reflected had passed. Eneas, pius Eneas, is the concrete presentment of an abstract virtue, a disused practice; and his epithet is less an epithet than part and parcel of his name. Virgil was recommended by Mæcenas to the notice of Augustus as a possible means to the great end of renewing the youth of Rome; and with this condition his imperial employer gave him a free hand. The ENEID stands as his executed commission, a poem deliberately designed to bring Rome back to her former religion, incorporating to this end,

with antiquarian lovingness, any old and loyal tradition which might rekindle the waning enthusiasms of a forgetful generation. In it may best be seen Piety at its best,-the piety which had made Rome great, but survived, when she was great only as a memory and a hope.

Few characters and few poems have suffered so much from misinterpretation as have Eneas and the ENEID. The circumstances of its origin are often neglected; for sufficient emphasis is not always laid upon the fact that the ÆNEID was a government manifesto, a state document, an authoritative ukase. It was part of the imperial scheme for the regeneration of Rome. The other reforms of Augustus were directed to the same end. One poet, whose armour of cynicism the flatteries of court and circle took long to penetrate, voluntarily calls him "Religion's founder and refunder," so true it was that he applied himself less to innovate than to renovate. With this, too, in view, Virgil introduced into his picture of pious times those references to former customs and fond superstitions, which strike us as cold, if not pedantic, but which sought to arrest them in their passage, and to quicken the fires which had once fomented them. What, then, was the nature of the pious man, and how was this Piety conceived, from whose restoration poet, patron, and emperor dated the moral salvation of the Roman world?

It was, to begin with, a wide virtue, giving laws to every relation of the patriarchal life. It expressed the obligation of man to God, of subject to state, of child to father. And it was further a reciprocal virtue, defining the relation of God to man, of state to subject, of father to child. There might be a conflict of pieties, a lesser contending with a greater, with perhaps a bias of love, or pity, or

desire, weighting the scale of the slighter duty. So the man of exact piety would have to balance and discriminate, to recognise, in fact, a rigid etiquette and right of precedence determining his action. The perfect The perfect man of Rome's ideal was heroic before he was human, grand before he was gracious. We miss in the picture designed by Virgil as a prototype of the makers of Rome, and an example to their degenerate descendants, that touch of amiable weakness which, albeit a declension from the standard of perfection, is at least a concession to the demands of flesh. Piety was a quality of sterling gold, without small change, and "pious Æneas" has, to modern eyes, the defects of his quality. He is chill, where love might have fired him; statuesque, where tenderness might have bent him; deaf, where he might have yielded to desire. This is the first point at which Piety clashes with later laws of conduct. We give our respect, but we withhold our admiration; we withhold even our consent to that conception of duty incarnate which confronts us in the ENEID. It is magnificent, but it is not life and herein lay its failure to convince in its own day. The starlike aloofness from human passion, the devoted pursuit of a far-off ideal, these may have been the qualities of that remote and consecrated pilgrim who brought the Latin gods from Ilium to Rome, but they were as impossible and mythological to the civilised Roman of the first centuries, before and after Christ, as were those vagrant gods themselves. Æneas is a hero, and no man; but the complexities of modern life cannot be resolved by the simple standard of heroism. The epic of Piety was also its epitaph, and day by day its light faded and its meaning failed.

:

How false, for instance, is our appreciation of the fourth book of the ÆNEID,

if we misinterpret the gravity of this virtue and under-estimate its scope. It has been said that here Virgil misses true greatness by failing to reconcile us to the conduct of Æneas. More discreetly seen, it is here that Virgil surpasses himself, and carries us with him beyond the limits of the drama of individual passion to a personal sympathy with a State moving across the stage, and a transcendent enthusiasm for a national idea. Rome herself moves in procession as the weighty lines of his narrative wind along. Let us consider this in more detail. The path of the perfect man, even on paper, was not always smooth. Piety was a religion, but the religion might be a yoke. Obedience and loyalty to a statuesque ideal could not proceed without some sacrifices by the way, as when Æneas, after the ghost of Hector had committed to him Troy and her gods, had to save his son, the future repository of that trust, and his aged father, before his wife. The romantic tale of suffering Dido, the loveliest widow whom any age has seen, is too well known to be repeated here; but one point is too often missed for us not to emphasise it. Romance and pathos and sentiment take the part of the deserted bride in the horror of her " waking dream" of endless journeying through an empty land, and in her desolate cry from the margin of the unkind sea which was bearing her lover away. "Go," she cried; "follow thine Italy before the wind, and seek thy kingdom through the waters. I only pray, if the perfect [pious] gods have power in aught, mayst thou drain thy punishment on some mid-ocean rock, calling again and again upon the name of Dido." And what is the answer to this appeal? Do the perfect gods exact the retribution due from broken vows and unhallowed pledges, or, if not, does the poet apologise in any way for the