"Not Pallas, nay, not Envy's self, could fault In all the work detect." Pallas herself had taught her, but she dis- | which love for mortal women had driven dains such praise ;-her art was all her own. them. But her work is so perfect that Let Pallas come to compare her skill. And Pallas came, but at first in shape of an ancient dame, who counsels the bold maiden to be content with victory over mortal competitors, but to avoid dangerous challenge to the gods. The advice is given in vain. Arachne rushes upon her fate. The goddess reveals herself, and the contest was begun. An admirable piece of word-painting fol lows: Pallas pictures the Hill of Mars at Athens, where the gods had sat in judgment in the strife between herself and Neptune as to who should be the patron deity of that fair city. "There stood the God Of Seas, and with his trident seemed to smite The rugged rock, and from the cleft out-sprang The Steed that for its author claimed the town. Herself, with shield and spear of keenest barb And helm, she painted; on her bosom gleamed The Ægis: with her lance's point she struck Pale, with its berried fruit :-and all the gods Arachne, disloyal, as the daughters of Pierus had been, to the Lords of Heaven, pictures them in the base disguises to The furious goddess smites her rival twelve times on the forehead: "The high-souled Maid form thou still She raised, and 'Live!' she said—' but hang A head minutest crowned;-to slenderest legs Leaving the goddess in the enjoyment of Sometimes Ovid gives us an opportu nity of comparing him with a great mas ter of his own art. A notable instance of the kind is the story of how Orpheus went down to the lower world in search of his lost Eurydice; how he won her by the charms of his song from the unpitying Gods of death, and lost her again on the very borders of life. sighed, His own Eurydice. O wasted toil! And she-'What miserable madness this, Amd carries me away, still stretching forth No reader will doubt with which poet be allowed that Ovid is strong in what the general superiority lies; yet it must may be called his own peculiar line. There is a noble tenderness and a genuine pathos in the parting of the two lovers, And vanished to the Ghosts that late she left." which is characteristic of the poet's hell Came the thin spectres of the sightless dead, Drives from the mountains. Mothers came, and sires, The funeral flames had eaten. All around genius. One of the longest as well as the most. striking episodes in the whole book is the contest between Ajax and Ulysses for the arms of the dead Achilles; and it has the additional interest of recalling the declamatory studies of the poet's youth. It is throughout a magnificent piece of rheto ric. craft and persuasiveness of Ulysses, are The blunt energy of Ajax, and the admirably given. The elder Seneca, in the poet was indebted for some of his mathe passage already quoted, mentions that terials and language to his teacher, Porcius Latro, one of whose declamations on "The Contest for the Arms" Seneca had either heard or read. One phrase is specified as having been borrowed from this source. It is the fiery challenge with which Ajax clenches his argument : : Enough of idle words! let hands, not tongues, Show what we are! Fling 'mid yon hostile With livid snakes; while Cerberus stood When some wild frenzy seized the lover's heart The piece is too long to be given (it fills more than half of the thirteenth book), and its effect would be lost in extracts. A few lines, however, from the beginning may be quoted; and indeed nothing throughout is more finely put. It may be as well to mention that the ships spoken of had been in imminent danger of destruction On high the chieftains sat: the common throng Stood in dense ring around; then Ajax rose, Lord of the seven-fold shield; and backward glanced, Scowling, for anger mastered all his soul, Where on Sigæum's shore the fleet was ranged, And with stretched hand: Before the ships we plead Our cause, great heaven! and Ulysses dares Before the ships to match himself with me!'" It may be noticed, as a proof that Ovid went out of his way, in introducing this episode, to make use of material to which he attached a special value, that the narrative is not really connected with any transformation. Ajax, defeated by the act which gives the arms to his rival, falls upon his sword; and the turf, wet with his blood, "Blossomed with the self-same flower That erst had birth from Hyacinthus' wound, Of either fate, the characters that shape What these characters were we learn from the end of the story here alluded to, of how the beautiful Hyacinthus was killed by a quoit from the hand of Apollo, and how "The blood That with its dripping crimson dyed the turf Two more specimens must conclude this chapter. Pygmalion's statue changing into flesh and blood at the sculptor's passionate prayer is a subject after Ovid's own heart, and he treats it with consummate delicacy and skill: And warmer, kissed again: and now his flesh ! The fifteenth or last book of the "Metamorphoses" contains an eloquent exposition of the Pythagorean philosophy. Pythagoras, a Greek by birth, had made Italy, the southern coasts of which were indeed thickly studded with the colonies of his nation, the land of his adoption, and the traditions of his teaching and of his life had a special interest for the people to which had descended the greatness of all the races-Oscan, Etrus can, Greek-which had inhabited the beautiful peninsula. A legend, careless, as such legends commonly are, of chronology, made him the preceptor of Numa, the wise king to whom Rome owed so much of its worship and its law. The doctrine most commonly connected with his name was that of the me tempsychosis, or transmigration of souls from one body to another, whether of man or of the lower animals, though it probably did not occupy a very prominent part in his Aryan race, and it had a practical aspect philosophy. It was an old belief of the which commended it to the Roman mind, always more inclined to ethical than to me taphysical speculations. Virgil, in that vision of the lower world which occupies the sixth book of his great epic, employs it-partly, indeed, as a poetical artifice for introducing his magnificent roll of Roman worthies, but also in a more serious aspect, as suggesting the method of those purifying influences which were to educate the human soul for higher destinies. Ovid sees in it the philo sophical explanation of the marvels which he has been relating, and, as it were, their O race of mortal men! what lust, what vice The willing labourer of your fields devour! vindication from the possible charge of being | Yet reeking torn, they read the hest of childish fables, vacant of any real meaning, Heaven!and unworthy of a serious pen. The passage which follows refers to a practical rule in which we may see a natural inference from the philosophical dogma. If man is so closely allied to the lower animals—if their forms are made, equally with his, the re: ceptacles of the one divine animating spirit then there is a certain impiety in his slaughtering them to satisfy his wants. Strangely enough, the progress or revolution of human thought has brought science again to the doctrine of man's kindred with the animals, though it seems altogether averse to the merciful conclusion which Pythagoras drew from it. * * * * * All changes: nothing perishes! Now here, beast ; It has been handed down to us on good authority that Virgil, in his last illness, desired his friends to commit his "Eneid" to the flames. It had not received his final corrections, and he was unwilling that it should go down to posterity less perfect than he could have made it. Evidences of this incompleteness are to be found, especially in the occasional inconsistencies of the narrative. Critics have busied themselves in discohave been corrected in revision. The desire, vering or imagining other faults which might though it doubtless came from a mind en feebled by morbid conditions of the body, lieve as much of what Ovid tells us of his was probably sincere. We can hardly be "As for the verses which told of the changed own intentions about the "Metamorphoses:" forms-an unlucky work, which its author's banishment interrupted-these in the hour of my departure I put, sorrowing, as I put many other of my good things, into the flames with my own hands." Doubtless he did so ; nothing could have more naturally displayed his vexation. But he could hardly have been ignorant that in destroying his manuscript he was not destroying his work. "As they แ but still did not perish altogether," he adds, exist, I suppose that there were several copies of them." But it is scarcely conceivable that a poem containing as nearly as possible twelve thousand lines should have existed in several copies by chance, or without the knowledge of the author. When he says that the work never received his final corrections, we may believe him, though we do not perceive any signs of imperfection. It is even possible that he employed some of his time during his banishment in giving some last touches to his verse. However this may be, the work has been accepted by posterity as second in ranksecond only to Virgil's epic-among the great monuments of Roman genius. It has been translated into every language of modern Europe that possesses a literature. Its astonishing ingenuity, the unfailing va riety of its colours, the flexibility with which its style deals alike with the sublime and the familiar, and with equal facility is gay and pathetic, tender and terrible, have well entitled it to the honour, and justify the boast with which the poet concludes: "So crown I here a work that dares defy Of all-devouring Time !-Come when it will [JOHANN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER, (better known in literature as JEAN PAUL) born 1763, died 1825; one of In early the most imaginative of German writers. life he was a teacher in private families, but became a copious writer of books, producing sixty-five volumes in about twenty-five years. Of these there have been translated into English " Levana, or Education,"" Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces," "Hesperus," and "Titan," both novels, and "The Campaner Thal" and other writings. Jean Paul's works are full of conspicuous merits, wit, sublimity and high moral purpose; they are also marred by characteristic defects, the style being often intricate, rambling and diffuse.] Once on a summer evening I lay upon & mountain in the sunshine, and fell asleep; and I dreamt that I awoke in the churchyard, having been roused by the rattling wheels of the tower clock, which struck eleven. I looked for the sun in the void 59 |