A queen, with swarthy checks and bold black | descent before being allowed to compete at

'Mr. Macborrowdale. -I should take it to be 'a description of the Queen of Bambo. The Reverend Doctor Opimian. Yet thus one of our most popular poets describes Cleopatra: and one of our most popular artists has illustrated the description by a portrait of a hideous grinning Ethiop. Moore led the way to this perversion by demonstrating, that the Egyptian women must have been beautiful, because they were "the country women of Cleopatra." Here we have a sort of counter-demonstration, that Cleopatra must have been a fright, because she was the countrywoman of the Agytians. But Cleopatra was a Greek, the daughter of Ptolemy Auletes and a lady of Pontus. The Ptolemies were Greeks, and whoever will look at their genealogy, their coins, and their medals, will see how carefully they kept their pure Greek blood uncontaminated by African intermixture. Think of this description and this picture, applied to one who, Dio says and all antiquity confirms him was "the most superlatively beautiful of women, splendid to see, and delightful to hear." For she was eminently accomplished: she spoke many languages with grace and facility. Her mind was as wonderful as her personal beauty. There is not a shadow of intellectual expression in that horrible portrait.'

the Olympic Games. But if, on the other hand, Lagus was a Macedonian, he was a 'barbarian;' and in either case, who is to answer for the purity of the Greek blood of the mothers either of the first Ptolemy, or the last? Thirdly, while unprepared to deal adequately with the coins,' we may mention that we once broached this very point to the late distinguished and lamented Professor Ramsay of Glasgow, and that he immediately produced some silver coins, in which Cleopatra had anything but the true classic outline which Peacock claimed for her. At the same time, we commit ourselves to neither theory, but reserve the question ad avizandum. It will be a curious thing if the physical colour of Queen Cleopatra should remain in controversy for ever, like the moral colour of Queen Mary!

He

After what has been quoted from Peacock, and said about him, the reader will readily believe that he was an old-fashioned scholar, and gentleman of the old school to the last. Such was indeed the case. told Mr. Thackeray, to whom we were indebted for the anecdote, that he now read nothing but Greek. He was heretical on the subject of Tennyson, and living poets generally. His favourite wine was Madeira. He consorted chiefly, out of his own private The interesting question thus mooted circle, with men of the past, - dining, we about Cleopatra demands, and would re- believe, nowhere except now and then at ward, a special dissertation. Here, we Lord Broughton's. He lived, as we have must be content to say, first, that it was not said before, near the Thames, and delighted Moore, but Shakspeare, who led the way' in going on its waters; and he cherished an to what Peacock calls the perversion' of intention never, unfortunately, carried making Cleopatra an Ethiop. Shakspeare out-of editing Sophocles. In these simspeaks of her as a gipsy, without any ple old-world pursuits he passed a vigorous warrant from his original authority for An- old age; and his portrait now before us by tony and Cleopatra,' Plutarch. Secondly, Mr. Wallis, shows us a veteran with a fine we must remark, that we wish the gene- massive brow, crowned with white hair, alogy' were more satisfactory. There is strong regular features, and a rather large bastardy and obscurity, or both, at both mouth, instinct with character, the whole ends of it! Ptolemy Auletes, the father of tinged with the reddish tints of a lusty Cleopatra, was certainly spurious; and English autumn. He died at Shepperton, Cicero says in one of his Orations, that it near his favourite river, early in the present was universally agreed that he was neither twelvemonth, having reached his eightyroyal in race nor character: 'Eum first year.

neque genere, neque animo regio esse, inter omnes video convenire.'* Granting, however, that he was the son of Ptolemy Soter, and thus seventh in descent from Ptolemy son of Lagus, the founder of the house,who was Lagus? He is sometimes called a bastard of the Royal house of Macedon, and if so, he was certainly of Hellenic descent, for they established their Hellenic

*Cicero, De Lege Agraria, Or. il. 16. See A. W. Zumpt's edition of these Orations, and his notes in oc. (Berlin, 1861.)

we

Francis Mahony, Father Prout, the last of our little group of humorists, was born at Cork in the beginning of the century believe about 1804. Aytoun confined himself to Scotland with a tenacity that in our age exposed him to provincialism. He sometimes went to a German bath, or to Paris, or London, but even London was to him a kind of foreign city; and in spite of the demonstrative Bohemianism of his comic writings, it was easy to see that he lived under the dominion of the local traditions

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of genteel' Edinburgh life. Peacock was the highest type, Mahony was a man of leta Londoner, whose heart, as we have said, ters by nature, and a priest only by acciclung to the Thames, and whose very schol- dent. There was a time in Europe when arship was of purely English type, not the two vocations were one; but we are borrowed, like too much of our modern drifting further from that tradition_every scholarship, from the Germans. But Ma- day; and Mahony's transition from Jesuithony, though intellectually an Irishman to ism into literature was only one sign out of the backbone, was, compared with these many of a movement going on all over the men, essentially cosmopolitan. He was as world. Nevertheless, when he threw himmuch at home in Rome as in London; in self on London, and became a FraserianParis as at Florence; and led a life resem- circa 1835, his ecclesiastical education bling that of the men of letters of the six- determined the form which his literary work teenth century rather than of those of took. He embodied himself in an imaginary to-day. Latin he knew, not as it is known Father Prout' of Watergrasshill, near at schools and colleges only, but with the fa- Cork, a priest of the old school, and attribmiliarity with which it was known to the uted all his writings to that fictitious personErasmuses and Buchanans; and he had a age, whose name came to be familiarly range of reading about the men of those applied to him, even in conversation. times, which might be matched, perhaps, was one of that race of priests' such is among a small circle of inquirers, but which Mahony's description-now, unfortunatecertainly nobody else combined, as he com- ly, extinct, or nearly so, like the old breed bined it, with the wit, and shrewdness, and of wolf-dogs in the island. I allude to those experience, and popular talent of a success- of his order who were educated abroad ful journalist and magazinist. The secret before the French Revolution, and had imof all this was his education on the Conti- bibed, from associating with the polished nent among the Jesuits. In early youth he and high-born clergy of the old Gallican was destined for the order, and went through Church, a loftier range of thought, and a their curriculum in Belgium, France, and superior delicacy of sentiment.' This senRome. When he was still young, his tal- tence is the key to much that was very ents must have attracted attention among characteristic in Mahony. He had strong their enemies, for in the Jésuites Modernes sympathy with the aristocracies, both of of the Abbé de la Roche Arnaud, a book birth and letters with historical families published against them in Paris in 1826, and with writers whose genius was enriched when they were thriving under the sceptre by learning; and he did not like the upof Charles Dix, a special article is devoted starts of either world. But he was, to 'O'Mahoni, né en Irlande.' 'Je ne sais,' above all, a humorist; and hence, in the the Abbé tells us, 's'il est parent du Comte Reliques of Father Prout,' all his gifts and de ce nom; mais à l'esprit, aux préjugés, et acquirements run to humour. And it is aux systèmes de M. le Comte, il ajoute le humour thoroughly Irish, in its brilliance, fanatisme, la dissimulation, la politique et its extravagance, and its waywardness of tout le caractère d'un Jésuite. fanciful epigram; a kind of practical joking S'il était confesseur de notre bon Roi, il ferait in literature, as if he pulled a curule chair de magnifiques auto-da-fé. La Com- from under you just when you were going pagnie destine le P. O'Mahoni à être à la to sit down, or put Attic garlic into your tête des congregations et des colléges. Elle omelette when your back was turned. To lui fait, pour cela, connaitre à fond les sci- what else shall we compare a writer's telling ences diverses de la société, et us, in the Rogueries of Tom Moore,' that Tom stole his Lesbia hath a Beaming Eye' from an old Latin song of my own, which I made when a boy, smitten with the charms of an Irish milk-maid?' and gravely proceeding to produce the 'original : '

l'on espère que docile aux leçons de ses maitres, le jeune O'Mahoni deviendra plus insensible et plus cruel encore que les inquisiteurs les plus endurcis de Saragosse et de Valence. Prout used to be prodigiously tickled by this account of himself and of his probable development; and his copy of the Abbé Roche Arnaud's book is now before us, with the following inscription in his own writing: Handed over with great gusto to my biographer and friend, at Paris, Rue des Moulins, 1865, Aug. 12th. Frank Mahony de Saragosse,' The truth is, that like many others, of whom the great Erasmus is

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'Lesbia semper hinc et inde
Oculorum tela movet,
Captat omnes, sed deinde
Quis ametur nemo novit.
Palpebrarum, Nora cara

Lux tuarum non est foris,
Flamma micat ibi rara
Sed sinceri lux amoris

teemed for his reading, and might be consulted about most subjects; for you found him over the 'Menagiana,' or Erasmus, or Buchanan, in regions where the ordinary Cockney littérateur (whom he held cheap) is wholly at sea. But his chief impression was made by his wit and humour. He could stand up against the epigrammatic needlegun of Douglas Jerrold; he was full of all sorts of anecdotes; and he had a great deal of curious gossip about known people especially countrymen of his own - which he gave out flavoured with droll sarcasm. The humour of his talk was very similiar to that of the Reliques,' as it is seen in the Apology for Lent' and the Rogueries of Tom Moore.' It was a sparkling kind of fun, with none of the dry gravity of contempt about it which is so effective in the Fhairshon' of Aytoun, but wilder in its mockery or sportiveness. Listen, for instance, to the learned pastor of Watergrasshill, haranguing - apropos of Lent - on the fastings of his race and Church:

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'I do not attach much importance to the Act of James I., who in 1619 issued a proclamation reminding his English subjects of the obligation of keeping Lent; because his Majesty's object is clearly ascertained to have been to encourage the traffic of his countrymen the Scotch, who had just then embarked largely in the herring trade, and for whom the thrifty Stuart was anxious to secure a monopoly in the British

markets.

'But when in 1627 I find the chivalrous

This ode is in Prout's paper on Litera- Charles 1., your martyred king, sending forth ture and the Jesuits'- an admirable sumfrom the Banqueting-room of Whitehall his mary of the services of the order to the royal decree to the same effect, I am at a loss cause of letters. He had always a kindness to trace his motives. It is known that Archfor them from that point of view, though he bishop Laud's advice went to the effect of reinmaintained that they were steadily deteri- a more diligent consideration of the subject, I stating many customs of Catholicity; but from orating in brains and scholarship, and he am more inclined to think that the King wished loved to trot out a forgotten father when rather, by this display of austere practices, to the occasion offered. What are you do- soothe and conciliate the Puritanical portion of ing?' he asked a literary friend one day in his subjects, whose religious notions were supthe Strand. A curious thing,' was the posed (I know not how justly) to have a tenanswer, an article on The Beard.' Ah, dency to self denial and the mortification of the said Prout, Laurence Beyerlinck, Magnum Roundheads were greater favourites at Billingsflesh. Certain it is that the Calvinists and Sheatrum Vitae Humanæ article barba!' gate than the High Church party; from which The hint was taken, and proved a most we may conclude that they consumed more fish, valuable one; but the question was natu- - a fact corroborated by the contemporary tesrally put to Prout by his friend next time timony of Samuel Butler, who says that when they met. Who was Beyerlinck?' the great struggle commenced Low Countries Jesuit,' Prout answered; 'one of the old fellows that Protestants are always running down; and his eye gave a mischievous twinkle of pleasure. As may be supposed, the Father was a pictur-views, that the King's beefeaters and the goresque figure in his ecclesiastical garb - for he always retained it, more or less among London journalists. He was

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"Each fisherwoman locked her fish up. And trudged abroad to cry No bishop!"

'I will only remark, in furtherance of my own mandizing Cavaliers of that period, could never stand in fair fight against the austere and fastes-ing Cromwellians.