the Carthaginians would come and would triumph, and then he drew a black picture of the desolation that would follow, the victors seizing the wealth that should have been employed against them, plundering and ransacking, carrying off wives and daughters, and selling sons for slaves. So effectively did he depict the catastrophe that the beautiful Cleora was excited out of her maidenly silence, and coming forward with blushes, but with spirit, she delivered some eloquent words in support of Timoleon, and laid down her own costly jewels at his feet as a contribution to the treasury. This fired them all, the decree was assented to, and every man tried to show himself more earnest than the others in suggesting means of defence. One reminded them that they could arm the slaves and make them fight. But Cleora's spirit again broke out, and she asked them proudly whether they would confide the patriot's noblest duty to such despicable hands. The idea was rejected. | Marullo, in waiting on his young mistress, heard her words, and bade some fellow-slaves meet him next night in secret. Then he attended his proud and beautiful lady home. Every man was soon in arms, Leosthenes, I need not say, among the rest. He ventured to seek Cleora, and in a passionate interview he declared his love. She gave him hers in return, and promised to be his when the enemy should be driven from Syracuse. But even then, at a moment when the beautiful girl's frank heart might be seen through her eyes, the doubting nature of Leosthenes was his enemy. He dared to hint that in his absence she might forget him, and that the addresses of other suitors might be listened to. Yet her loving heart conquered her pride, and she did not say that he who could doubt her was no mate for her. What think you she did? It would not have occurred to the most devoted maiden of our time, but what I tell is true. Cleora commanded him to obey her on pain of losing her. He could but obey.

She gave a last look at the sun then glowing above them, and declared that she would see it no more until the return of that distrustful man. Then she bid him bind her kerchief over her eyes. It was done, and she begged him to guide her to his lips, on which she set the last kiss she would receive until he came back. She did more: she vowed that she would not even speak to any one until they should meet again. These were the vows of a time when follies were done; but if you deserve to hear of such a girl as Cleora, you will not smile at her devotion.

The lords, and the gentlemen, and the soldiers went bravely forth to the battle, and Syracuse was left to the women and the slaves. To the slaves! Marullo had not listened in vain, nor met his fellows in vain. He had held his council, and some he had inflamed with speech, some with wine. He put a new spirit into the trampled men, and he bade them change places with their masters. The city was their own. Let them seize treasure, houses, luxuries, wives, and daughters, and revel in the enjoyment of liberty. Onlythey must shed no blood.

The fire spread, the slaves flew exultingly to their vengeance, and in an hour all was changed, and the slaves were masters. Marullo, no longer a slave, demanded an interview with Cleora. The splendid bondman had dared to love her.

Love her, but how? This is not a Frenchman's story. Here would come in his lurid and powerful wickedness, and he will give me his artistic pity for throwing away the effect he would have made. But I am in a friend's hands, and he bids me tell of no atrocity.

Marullo could command an entrance, but he entreated it, and, followed to the door of the house by his furious adherents, drew his sword and menaced death to any man who should dare come a step further and affright Cleora. Then, sheathing his sword and baring his head, he trod gently into the lady's presence. He then begged leave to tell his story to the blindfolded girl. But he would not even venture to begin it until she gave some gracious sign that she would be pleased to hear him. His voice must have been gracious, for Cleora held out her hand, which he reverently kissed. Then he in his turn declared his love and his knowledge that Leosthenes was his favoured rival. He could have slain Leosthenes, he said, with more ease than he could tell of his power; but love, seconded by duty, bade him remember that Cleora loved the man. was so? he asked, and Cleora bowed her head in token of assent and thankfulness. But Leosthenes was gone, he went on, yet then, when the baser passions of Marullo were chiding him for neglecting his opportunity, and reminding him that he could now, without let or stay, carry off Cleora and make her his own, he was still master of himself. He asked nothing but what could be freely yielded. He told once more the story of his ardent love, and had nought else to say save that not only hope was gone, but that at the end of the war he must expect torture and death. But he defied all, and would remain to protect her,

It

and prove his devotion by delivering her over in safety and purity to his rival. Again, with her permission, he pressed a kiss upon her hand, and averring that such a favour had paid him for all past and future sufferings, he left her.

Timoleon had led the Syracusans to victory: the Carthaginians were slaughtered in thousands; and the remnant, with their helpless admiral Gisco, fied to their ships and made sail for their savage city. Syracuse was saved, and the armies marched back to it in triumph. But there were no signs of welcome-no procession of virgins with the statues of the gods, no laurel crowns and hymns. The gates were shut, and above them and on the walls were the defiant slaves, headed by Marullo. To the furious demands of the masters a mocking slave replied by informing them of what had been done in their absence, and his ribald boasts drove them to fury. Then, in a nobler vein, Marullo, at the call of the rest, spoke out, told the lords that slaves ought to be treated as in the good old times (so you see that there were good old times to be regretted even then), and not with the cruelty and brutality which the slaves of Syracuse had endured. They had been forced into revolt, and unless redress were given they would defend them selves with the strong hand. He demanded pardon for all that had been done, liberty for those who chose to leave the island, and for those who remained to serve competent maintenance. The masters, in a whirlwind of rage, rejected all his proposals and rushed to the assault, thinking to sweep away the defenders of the gates; but Marullo cheered his friends to the fight, and they fought bravely; and the masters, baffled, were forced to retreat, foaming with new rage.

Again Timoleon came to their aid, and he gave them counsel. It was based on the veteran's long acquaintance with human nature. brutalized by slavery. They will fight, he said, while the arms of a soldier are brought against them their pride is roused, and they show themselves men. And they have never learned to fear the sword. Show them that which they have learned to fear: go out against them again, but instead of swords-brandish your whips.

His counsel was taken, and it gave the day to the masters. The sight of the weapons of torture struck abject terror into the hearts of the slaves, and they fled from the presence of their lords. The gates were opened, and Syracuse was again in the hands of its aristocracy. Foremost rushed in Leosthenes to learn what

| had chanced to Cleora, and dreading to hear. He sought her house, and hardly dared to question her maid; but at length, when he was assured that Cleora had been unharmed and was ready to be led forth to him, the demon of suspicion again arose from the deeps and whispered. The true and faithful girl came forth, still wearing the bandage which he had bound upon her brow. He removed the kerchief, and received back from her the kiss which she said she had but borrowed when last they met. Leosthenes was happy for the moment, and his natural generosity was shown in his instant demand for the name of the man who had preserved her. He would load him with gold, if his station permitted such reward, or labour to win him honours, if of higher rank.

Then Cleora, all truth, told him the whole story, and that she had been saved by one who hated him and loved her, and she dwelt on all his reverent tenderness. 'But you withhold his name," impatiently cried Leosthenes.

"Marullo, my father's bondman."

Leosthenes broke into angry laughter, which yielded to fiercer utterance as Cleora, with generous gratitude for her salvation, remonstrated with him for his scorn of one who had acted so nobly. Again she dwelt upon the chivalry of the slave (it was in days before chivalry was so called, but the quality was there), and bade Leosthenes consider how grandly Marullo, with all in his power, had borne himself. And she then asked, as of right, that whatever vengeance might be reserved for other rebels, Marullo, for what he had done for her, was to be unharmed. To the voice in the jealous eye of Leosthenes she answered that she could not be so greatly injured as by unjust suspicion, and that she loved the mind of Marullo, not his person. And Leosthenes remaining darkly moody, Cleora left him. But Marullo, who had instinctively remained in his mistress' house, was instantly seized, and after a fearless declaration that he loved Cleora, and even had deserved her, was loaded with chains and dragged away to a dungeon.

This was unknown to Cleora, who sought her father, and after telling him of her fears that the nature of Leosthenes, noble as he was, would bar their happiness, she obtained a promise that Archidamus would do all he could to serve Marullo. But when the maiden learned from her attendant that he had been hurried away to the jail, her spirit flashed up once more, and she followed him thither. Gold made way for her: a bribe to the jailer,

Thou heard'st, O God of battle! Thou whose look Snappeth the spear in sunder. In thy strength A youth, thy chosen, laid their champion low. Saul, Saul pursues, o'ertakes, divides the spoil; Wreathes round our necks these chains of gold, and robes

Our limbs with floating crimson. Then rejoice, Daughters of Israel! from your cymbals shake Sweet clangour. hymning God, the Lord of Hosts! Ye shout! and ye, make answer! Saul hath slain His thousands; David his ten thousands slain.

A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER.1

The love of Nature in and for herself, or as a mirror for the moods of the mind, is a modern thing. The fleeing to her as an escape from man was brought into fashion by Rousseau; for his prototype Petrarch, though he had a taste for pretty scenery, had a true antique horror for the grander aspects of nature. He got once to the top of Mount Ventoux, but it is very plain that he did not enjoy it. Indeed, it is only within a century or so that the search after the picturesque has been a safe employment. It is not so even now in Greece or Southern Italy. Where the Anglo-Saxon carves his cold fowl, and leaves the relics of his picnic, the ancient or medieval man might be pretty confident that some ruffian would try the edge of his knife on a chicken of the Platonic sort, and leave more precious bones as an offering to the genius of the place. The ancients were certainly more social than we, though that, perhaps, was natural enough, when a good part of the world was still covered with forest. They huddled together in cities as well for safety as to keep their minds warm. The Romans had a fondness for country life, but they had fine road., and Rome was always within easy reach. The author of the book of Job is the earliest I know of who showed any profound sense of the moral meaning of the outward world; and I think none has approached him since, though Wordsworth comes nearest with the first two books of the Prelude. But their feeling is not precisely of the kind I speak of as modern, and which gave rise to what is called descriptive poetry. Chaucer opens his "Clerk's Tale" with a bit of landscape admirable for its large style, and as well composed as any Claude.

"There is right at the west end of Itaille, Down at the root of Vesulus the cold,

1 From My Study Windows. By J. Russell Lowell, AM.. Professor of Belles-Lettres in Harvard College, Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

A lusty plain abundant of vitaille,
Where many a tower and town thou mayst behold,
That founded were in time of fathers old,

And many an other délectable sight;
And Saluces this noble country hight."

What an airy precision of touch there is here, and what a sure eye for the points of character in landscape! But the picture is altogether subsidiary. No doubt the works of Salvator Rosa and Gaspar Poussin show that there must have been some amateur taste for the grand and terrible in scenery; but the British poet Thomson ("sweet-souled" is Wordsworth's apt word) was the first to do with words what they had done partially with colours. He was turgid, no good metrist, and his English is like a translation from one of those poets who wrote in Latin after it was dead; but he was a man of sincere genius, and not only English, but European literature is largely in his debt. He was the inventor of cheap amusement for the million, to be had of All-out-doors for the asking. It was his impulse which unconsciously gave direction to Rousseau, and it is to the school of Jean Jacques that we owe St. Pierre, Cowper, Châteaubriand, Wordsworth, Byron, Lamartine, George Sand, Ruskin-the great painters of ideal landscape.

So long as men had slender means, whether of keeping out cold or checkmating it with artificial heat, winter was an unwelcome guest. especially in the country. There he was the bearer of a lettre-de-cachet, which shut its victims in solitary confinement, with few resources but to boose round the fire and repeat ghoststories, which had lost all their freshness and

none of their terror.

To go to bed was to lie awake of cold, with an added shudder of fright whenever a loose casement or a waving curtain chose to give you the goose-flesh. Bussy Rabutin, in one of his letters, gives us a notion how uncomfortable it was in the country, with green wood, smoky chimneys, and doors and windows that thought it was their duty to make the wind whistle, not to keep it out. With fuel so dear, it could not have been much better in the city, to judge by Ménage's warning against the danger of our dressing-gowns taking fire while we cuddle too closely over the sparing blaze. The poet of Winter himself is said to have written in bed, with his hand through a hole in the blanket; and we may suspect that it was the warmth quite as much as the company that first drew men together at the coffee-house. Coleridge, in January, 1800, writes to Wedgewood: "I am sitting by a fire in a rug greatcoat. It is most barbarously cold, and you, I fear, can shield

yourself from it only by perpetual imprisonment." This thermometrical view of winter is, I grant, a depressing one: for I think there is nothing so demoralizing as cold. I know of a boy who, when his father, a bitter economist, was brought home dead, said only, "Now we can burn as much wood as we like.' I would not offhand prophesy the gallows for that boy. I remember with a shudder a pinch I got from the cold once in a railroad-car. A born fanatic of fresh air, I found myself glad to see the windows hermetically sealed by the freezing vapour of our breath, and plotted the assassination of the conductor every time he opened the door. I felt myself sensibly barbarizing, and would have shared Colonel Jack's bed in the ash-hole of the glass-furnace with a grateful heart. Since then I have had more charity for the prevailing ill opinion of winter. It was natural enough that Ovid should measure the years of his exile in Pontus by the number of winters:

"Ut sumus in Ponto, ter frigore constitit Ister, Facta est Euxini dura ter unda maris:" Thrice hath the cold bound Ister fast, since I In Pontus was, thrice Euxine's wave made hard. Jubinal has printed an Anglo-Norman piece of doggerel in which Winter and Summer dispute which is the better man. It is not without a kind of rough and inchoate humour, and I like it because old Whitebeard gets tolerably fair play. The jolly old feilow boasts of his rate of living, with that contempt of poverty which is the weak spot in the burly English nature:

Ja Dien ne place que me ayyenge

Que ne face plus honour

Et plus despenz en un soul jour

Que vus en tote vostre vie:"

Now God forbid it hap to me

That I make not more great display,
And spend more in a single day
Than you can do in all your life.

The best touch, perhaps, is Winter's claim for credit as a mender of the highways, which was not without point when every road in Europe was a quagmire during a good part of the year unless it was bottomed on some remains of Roman engineering:

"Je sn, fet-il, seignur et mestre

Et à bon droit le dey estre,
Quant de la bowe face caucé
Par un petit de geelé:"

Master and lord I am, says he,
And of good right so ought to be.
Since I make causeys, safely crost,
Of mud, with just a pinch of frost.

But there is no recognition of Winter as the best of out-door company.

Even Emerson, an open-air man, and a bringer of it, if ever any, confesses,

"The frost-king ties my fumbling feet, Sings in my ear, my hands are stones, Curdles the blood to the marble bones, Tugs at the heart-strings, numbs the sense, And hems in life with narrowing fence." Winter was literally "the inverted year," as Thomson called him; for such entertainments as could be had must be got within doors. What cheerfulness there was in brumal verse was that of Horace's dissolve frigus ligna super foco large reponens, so pleasantly associated with the cleverest scene in Roderick Random. This is the tone of that poem of Walton's friend Cotton, which won the praise of Wordsworth:

The ceaseless winds blow ice, be my retreat
Between the groaning forest and the shore
Beat by the boundless multitude of waves,
A rural, sheltered, solitary scene,
Where ruddy fire and beaming tapers join
To cheer the gloom. There studious let me sit
And hold high converse with the mighty dead."

Doctor Akenside, a man to be spoken of with respect, follows Thomson. With him, too, "Winter desolates the year," and

"How pleasing wears the wintry night
Spent with the old illustrious dead!
While by the taper's trembling light

I seem those awful scenes to dread
Where chiefs or legislators lie," &c.