whose stories have not reached posterity, but are said to have obtained a celebrity to which their merit hardly entitled them.' It is strange that Severus, in a letter to the senate, in which he upbraids its members for the honours they had heaped on his rival, and the support they had given to his pretensions, should, amid accusations that concerned him more nearly, have expressed his chief mortification to arise from their having distinguished that person as learned, who had grown hoary in the study of old wives' tales, such as the MilesianPunic fables.-Major fuit dolor, quod illum pro literato laudandum plerique duxistis, cum ille neniis quibusdam anilibus occupatus, inter Milesias Punicas Apuleii suit, et ludicra literaria consenes

ceret.

But the most celebrated fable of ancient Rome is the work of Petronius Arbiter, perhaps the most remarkable fiction which has dishonoured the literary history of any nation. It is the only fable of that period now extant, but is a strong proof of the monstrous corruption of the times in which such a production could be tolerated, though, no

'Milesias nonnulli ejusdem esse dicunt, quarum fama non ignobilis habetur, quamvis mediocriter scriptæ sunt.—Capitolinus vit. Clod. Albini.

doubt, writings of bad moral tendency might be circulated before the invention of printing, without arguing the depravity they would have evinced, if presented to the world subsequent to that period.

The work of Petronius is in the form of a satire, and, according to some commentators, is directed against the vices of the court of Nero, who is thought to be delineated under the names of Trimalchio and Agamemnon ;—an opinion which has been justly ridiculed by Voltaire. The satire is written in a manner which was first introduced by Varro; verses are intermixed with prose, and jests with serious remark. It has much the air of a romance, both in the incidents and their disposition; but the story is too well known, and too scandalous, to be particularly detailed. The scene is laid in Magna Græcia; Encolpius is the chief character in the work, and the narrator of events;-he commences by a lamentation on the decline of eloquence, and while listening to the reply of Agamemnon, a professor of oratory, he loses his companion Ascyltos. Wandering through the town in search of him, he is finally conducted by an old woman to a retirement where the incidents that occur are analogous to the scene. The subsequent adventures-the feast of Trimalchio-the

defection and return of Giton-the amour of Eumolpus in Bythinia-the voyage in the vessel of Lycus-the passion and disappointment of Circe, follow each other without much art of arrangement; an apparent defect which may arise from the mutilated form in which the satire has descended to us.

The style of Petronius has been much applauded for its elegance-it certainly possesses considerable naiveté and grace, and is by much too fine a veil for so deformed a body. Some of the verses also are extremely beautiful. The best part of the prose, however, is the wellknown episode of the matron of Ephesus, which, I have little doubt, was originally a Milesian or Sybarite fable. A lady of Ephesus, on the death of her husband, not contented with the usual demonstrations of grief, descended with the corpse into the vault in which it was entombed, resolving there to perish with sorrow. From this design no entreaties of her own or her husband's friends could dissuade her. But at length a common soldier, who had been appointed to watch the bodies of malefactors crucified in the vicinity, lest they should be taken down by their relations, perceiving a light, descended into the vault, where he gazed on the beauty of the mourner, whom he soon persuaded

to eat, to drink, and to live. That very night, in her funeral garments, in the commencement of her grief, and in the tomb of her husband, she was united to this new and unknown lover. When the soldier ascended from this bridal chamber, he found that the body of a criminal had been carried off. He returned to his mistress to deplore the punishment that awaited him for his neglect, but she immediately relieved his disquiet, by proposing that the corpse of the husband, whose funeral she had so vehemently mourned, should be raised, and nailed to the cross in room of the malefactor.

A story nearly the same with that in Petronius exists, under title of the Widow who was Comforted, in the book known in this country by name of the Seven wise Masters, which is one of the oldest collections of oriental stories. There, however, the levity of the widow is aggravated by the circumstance that the husband had died in consequence of alarm at a danger to which his wife had been exposed, and that she consented to mutilate his body, in order to give it a perfect resemblance to that of the malefactor which had been taken down from the cross.

This story of female levity has frequently been imitated, both in its classical and oriental circumstances. It is the Fabliau De la femme qui se fist putain sur la fosse de son mari. The Pere du

Halde, in his History of China, informs us that it is a common story in that empire; but the most singular place for the introduction of such a tale was the Rule and Exercise of holy Dying, by Jeremy Taylor, where it forms part of the 5th chapter, entitled, Of the Contingencies of Death and Treating our Dead.

The Latin writers of fiction seem to have been uniformly more happy in their episodes than in the principal subject. This remark is particularly applicable to the

ASS OF APULEIUS,

to which its readers, on account of its excellence, as is generally supposed, added the epithet of Golden. Warburton, however, conjectures, from the beginning of one of Pliny's epistles, that Auriæ was the common title given to the Milesian, and such tales as strollers used to tell for a piece of money to the rabble in a circle: "Assem para et accipe auream fabulam." (L. ii. Ep. 20.) These Milesian fables were much in vogue in the age Apuleius. Accordingly, in the commencement of his work, he allures his readers with the promise of a fashionable composition, though he early in

of

'At ego tibi sermone isto Milesio varias fabulas conseram, auresque tuas benevolas lepido susurro permulceam,