country of frost and barbarism. Cicero abandoned himself to despair, and took it ill that his wife and friends pressed him to maintain his equanimity; he contended that it was stupidity and not virtue to be insensible to mental or bodily pain. After his return to Rome, which was accompanied by many triumphant circumstances, he spoke four orations that had reference to his exile. Two remarkable controversies have been agitated concerning the genuineness of the four extant orations purporting to be those which he delivered. From what he says himself of one of these orations, that for the recovery of his House, and, from the nature of the subject, one cannot feel satisfied that we have his original speech, at least in a perfect state. Our scepticism on such points is the more justifiable, from the circumstance that it was very common for the rhetoricians, from the time of Tiberius to the fall of the empire, to declaim on the subjects of Cicero's orations. Cicero partly brought on his own interdiction from fire and water, (for that was the Roman form of banishment), and he was sensible afterwards of his imprudence. Clodius's law was general against persons who caused citizens to be put to death without a trial. Now the senate, though not more at Cicero's instigation than that of Cato, had so dealt with the Catilinarian conspirators-Cicero put on a mourning robe, and went about the city imploring clemency like a culprit under accusation; thus making the law personal, which, in fair construction, applied to the senate, and not to himself in particular. One of the finest touches of Virgil, in his Ænead, is that in which a follower of Evander, slain in battle at a distance from his native country, calls to mind, in his last moments, his "beloved Argos." Lord Byron appears to have had his eye on the passage, in his description of the statue of the Dying Gladiator. The arena swims around him-he is gone, Ere ceased the inhuman shout which hail'd the wretch who won- Were with his heart, and that was far away; The Decii, father, son, and grandson, and a catalogue of Roman names testify what has been achieved under the impulse of a love of country. But, perhaps, there will not be found many authentic instances of so calm and deliberate, and yet resolute an act of patriotism, as that which Milton relates , of his undertaking his celebrated Defence of the English People. "When that task of answering the king's defence was enjoined me by public authority, being both in an ill state of health, and the sight of one eye gone already, the physicians openly predicting the loss of both if I undertook this labor; yet nothing terrified by their premonition, I did not long balance whether my duty should be preferred to my eyes." Well might he write, in one of his noble sonnets, What supports me, dost thou ask? The conscience, friend, t'have lost them overply'd With which all Europe rings from side to side. The subject of the connection of man's feelings with the place of his birth may not inappropriately be concluded with Lord Byron's verses on the Church of Santa Croce at Florence. Michael Angelo, Galileo, and Machiavelli are buried there; but it wants the bones of Dante, Petrarch and Boc caccio : But where repose the all Etruscan three Dante, and Petrarch, and, scarce less than they Of the hundred tales of love-where did they lay Ungrateful Florence! Dante sleeps afar, His life, his fame, his grave, though rifled-not thine own. Ilis dust, and lies it not her great among, With many a sweet and solemn requiem breath'd The poetry of speech? No; even his tomb No more amidst the meaner dead find room, Nor claim a passing sigh, because it told for whom ! And Santa Croce wants their mighty dust, While Florence vainly begs her banish'd dead and weeps. An interesting feature in our literature, as connected with infancy and childhood, are the epitaphs by our poets on young people. English epitaphs are, generally speaking, very inferior to the Greek in point of simplicity. Herrick's epitaphs are among our best on children. The following is a specimen : Ambrose Phillips wrote a pretty epitaph on a child. The concluding stanza contains point, without conceit : When the Archangel's trump shall blow, And souls to bodies join, Millions will wish their lives below Had been as short as thine. Headly, to whom we are much indebted for the revival of our ancient poetry, and who possessed considerable taste, admires what he calls the Greekness of the following epitaph It wants the indivion a young nobleman, by Drummond. duality of a Greek epitaph; the Greeks also generally introduced the name of the deceased into their epitaphs. Fame, register of Time, Write in thy scroll, that I, Of wisdom lover, and sweet poesy, Was cropped in my prime, And ripe in worth, though green in years, did die. The thought in the concluding line is borrowed from the ancients. The idea is well enough as Drummond left it; it becomes a conceit when too much developed, as Habingdon, the author of Castara, has done in an elegy on the son of the Earl of Ayr; this is one of our boldest poets for conceits. 'Tis false arithmetic to say thy breath The point as thus sharpened was just of a nature to take the fancy of Young; few of our poets have been so fond of witty antitheses: accordingly, in his "Night Thoughts" we have: Methusalems may die at twenty-one. A simple idea in a pretty Greek epitaph by Lucian has been borrowed by Dr. King in an epitaph on two children buried together,-like those whose figures have been so beautifully sculptured by Chantrey on the monument in Litchfield Cathedral. The epitaph, however, has no particular point with reference to two persons, nor did Lucian so apply it. And though they cannot number many years Headly considers the following epitaph as Carew's masterpiece : The Lady Mary Villiers lies Under this stone; with weeping eyes L |