peror is at dinner with his wife. Well, well, I'll do thy bidding, if it be but to have the whipping of thee afterwards for an impudent madman. Three moles on the emperor's breast! how roy. ally thou shalt be beaten, my friend."

When the porter told the empress what the poor madman at the gate had said, she held down her head, and said, with a sorrowful voice, unto her lord, "My good lord and king, here is a fellow at the palace-gate that hath sent unto me, and bids me, by those secret signs known only to thou and me, to send him the imperial robes, and welcome him as my husband and my sovereign." When the fictitious emperor heard this, he bade the attendants bring in Jovinian. And lo, as he entered the hall, the great wolfhound, that had slept at his feet for years, sprang from his lair, and would have pulled him down, had not the attendants prevented him; whilst the falcon, that had sat on his wrist in many a fair day's hawking, broke her jesses, and flew out of the hall: so changed was Jovinian the emperor.

"Nobles and friends," said the new emperor, "hear ye what I will ask of this man."

And the nobles bowed assent, whilst the emperor asked of Jovinian his name, and his business with the empress.

"Askest thou me who I am, and wherefore I am come ?" rejoined Jovinian. "Am not I thy emperor, and the lord of this

house and this realm ?"

"These our nobles shall decide,” replied the new king. "Tell me now, which of us twain is your emperor ?"

And the nobles answered with one accord: "Thou dost trifle with us, sire. Can we doubt that thou art our emperor, whom we have known from his childhood? As for this base fellow, we know not who he is."

And with one accord the people cried out against Jovinian that he should be punished.

On this the usurper turned to the empress of Jovinian"Tell me," said he, "on thy true faith, knowest thou this man who calls himself emperor of this realm ?"

And the empress answered, "Good my lord, have not thirty years passed since I first knew thee, and became the mother of our children? Why askest thou me of this fellow ? and yet it

doth surprise me how he should know what none save you and I can know ?"

Then the usurper turned to Jovinian, and with a harsh countenance rebuked his presumption, and ordered the executioners to drag him by the feet by horses until he died. This said he before all his court; but he sent his servant to the jailor, and commanded him to scourge Jovinian; and for this once to set him free.

The deposed emperor desired death. "Why," said he to himself, "should I now live? my friends, my dependents, yea, even the partner of my bed, shuns me, and I am desolate among those whom my bounties have raised. Come, I will seek the good priest, to whom I so often have laid open my most secret faults: of a surety, he will remember me."

Now, the good priest lived in a small cell, nigh to a chapel about a stone's cast from the palace-gate; and when Jovinian knocked, the priest being engaged in reading, answered from within, "Who is there? why troublest thou me ?"

"I am the emperor Jovinian; open the window, I would speak to thee," replied the fugitive.

Immediately the narrow window of the cell was opened, and the priest, looking out, saw no one save the poor half-clothed Jovinian. "Depart from me, thou accursed thing," cried the priest; "thou art not our good lord the emperor, but the foul fiend himself, the great tempter."

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Alas, alas!" cried Jovinian, "to what fate am I reserved, that even my own good priest despises me! Ah me, I bethink me--in the arrogance of my heart, I called myself a god: the weight of my sin is grievous unto me. Father, good father, hear the sins of a miserable penitent."

Gladly did the priest listen to Jovinian; and when he had told him all his sins, the good priest comforted the penitent, and assured him of God's mercy, if his repentance was sincere. And so it happened that on this a cloud seemed to fall from before the eyes of the priest; and when he again looked on Jovinian, he knew him to be the emperor, and he pitied him, clothing him with such poor garments as he had, and went with him to the palace-gate.

The porter stood in the gateway, and, as Jovinian and the

priest drew near, he made a lowly obeisance, and opened the gate for the emperor. "Dost thou know me ?" asked the em

peror.

"Very well, my lord," replied the servant; "but I wish that you had not left the palace."

So Jovinian passed on to the hall of his palace; and as he went, all the nobles rose and bowed to the emperor; for the usurper was in another apartment, and the nobles knew again the face of Jovinian.

But a certain knight passed into the presence of the false emperor. "My lord," said he, "there is one in the great hall to whom all men bow, for he so much resembleth you that we know not which is the emperor."

Then said the usurper to the empress, know this man."

"Go and see if you

"Oh, my good lord," said the empress, when she returned from the hall, "whom can I believe? are there, then, two Jovinians ?" "I will myself go and determine," rejoined the usurper, as he took the empress by her hand, and, leading her into the great hall, placed her on the throne beside himself.

"Kinsfolk and nobles," said the usurper, "by the oaths ye have sworn, determine between me and this man.'

And the empress answered, "Let me, as in duty bound, speak first. Heaven be my witness, I know not which is my lord and husband."

And all the nobles said the same.

Thereupon the feigned Jovinian rose and spake: "Nobles and friends, hearken! that man is your emperor and your master; hear ye him; know that he did exalt himself above that which was right, and make himself equal unto God. Verily he hath been rewarded; he hath suffered much indignity and wrong, and, of God's will, ye knew him not; he hath repented him of his grievous sin, and the scourge is now removed; he has made such satisfaction as man can make. Hear ye him, know him, obey him."

As the feigned emperor thus addressed the astonished nobles, his features seemed illumined with a fair and spiritual light, his imperial robes fell from off him, and he stood confessed before the assembly an angel of God, clothed in white raiment. And, as

he ended his speech, he bowed his head, and vanished from their sight.

Jovinian returned to his throne, and for three years reigned with so much mercy and justice, that his subjects had no cause to regret the change of their emperor. And it came to pass, af.

ter the space of three years, the same angel appeared to him in a dream, and warned him of his death. So Jovinian dictated his troublous life to his secretaries, that it might remain as a warning unto all men against worldly pride, and an incitement to the performance of our religious duties. And when he had so done, he meekly resigned himself, and fell asleep in death.

"So much for the story, as a story; now for the moral, with all that eccentric spirit of refinement and abstraction with which the age was characterized," said Herbert.

"The moral in this case is less eccentric than in many to which I hope we shall come before Christmas is over."

"Jovinian was but the picture of the proud, worldly-minded man, entirely given up to vanity and folly. The first knight whose castle he visited was True Wisdom, ever disdainful of the pomps and vanities of the world. The next knight was Conscience. The dog that turned against his old master, was the lusts of the flesh, our own evil desires, which will ever in the end turn against those who have pampered them. The falcon is God's grace; the Empress, Man's soul; and the clothes in which the good priest clothed the halffrozen emperor, are those kingly virtues which he had thrown off, when he gave loose to the vanities of the world."

"It must be admitted," remarked Herbert, "that from very early times a secondary meaning was commonly attached to every important work; it progressed from the sacred writings through the poetic fictions of the classics, to compositions professedly allegorical. The want of discrimination, which in our eyes assumes much of the appearance of profane levity, with which the fictions of the classics were interpreted to signify the great truths and mysteries of religion, was, perhaps, hardly reprehensible in the simple state of knowledge which prevailed at the time when these attempts at secondary interpretation were made."

"And hence it was," said Lathom, "that in the early ages it might seem to partake of little levity to prefigure our Saviour's birth in that of Bacchus ; his sufferings and death in that of Acteon, or his resurrection in the legend of Hercules, as related by Lycophron; as late as the thirteenth century the Franciscan Walleys wrote a moral and theological exposition of the Metamorphoses of Ovid."

"But surely the writers of that age did not stop there," said Thompson; "was it not the case, that to these expositions succeeded compositions professedly

allegorical, and which the spirit of refinement of that age resolved into further allegories, for which they were never intended?"

Undoubtedly so!" replied Lathom; "it was not enough that the writer of the Romaunt of the Rose' had allegorized the difficulties of an ardent lover in the accomplishment of his object, under the mystery of the rose which was to be gathered in a fair but almost inaccessible garden. Every profession saw in this allegory the great mystery of their craft. To the theologian it was the rose of Jericho, the New Jerusalem, the Blessed Virgin, or any other mystery to which obstinate heretics were unable to attain; to the chemist it was the philosopher's stone; to the lawyer it was the most consummate point of equity; to the physician the infallible panacea, the water of life; and does not this spirit of allegory extend to the present day, only in a somewhat different form?"

"Not unlike the present system of commentating," remarked Henry Herbert. "As soon as a poet has attained to any great reputation, and death has sealed up his writings, then comes the host of annotators and critics, each one more intent than his predecessor to develop the mind of the writer, to discover with what hidden intentions, with what feelings, this or that passage was written, and to build on some stray expression a mighty theory, for some more clever writer to overthrow, and raise a new fabric on its ruins. And in these attempts it is not the old author whose glory is sought to be heightened, but the new man who would ascend the ladder of reputation on the labours of the 'man of old.""

"Far different," rejoined Lathom, " was the spirit which prompted the fashion of resolving every thing into allegories in the middle ages; nor, indeed, is it to be solely charged to an unmeaning and wanton spirit of refinement. The same apology,' says Wharton, may be offered for cabalistic interpreters, both of the classics and of the old romances. The former, not willing that those books should be quite exploded which contained the ancient mythology, laboured to reconcile the apparent absurdities of the pagan system with the Christian mysteries, by demonstrating a figurative resemblance. The latter, as true learning began to dawn, with a view of supporting for a time the expiring credit of giants and magicians, were compelled to palliate those monstrous incredibilities, by a bold attempt to unravel the mystic web which had been wove by fairy hands, and by showing that truth was hid under the gorgeous veil of gothic invention.' And now, Thompson, we must adjourn, you to your real Greeks and Romans, Herbert and I to Aristotle's Summum Bonum." 3