"Her wits to fail!" murmured the king; "I have known what it is to feel almost a mad impatience of the will; but I knew not that these gentle creatures, women, could so feel for such a Phorbas brought out the laurel-crown, and told him. how the half of it became bare. The impatient blood of Dora. cles mounted, but not in anger, to his face; and, breaking up the party, he requested that the picture might be removed to his own chamber, promising to return it.

A whole year, however, did he keep it; and as he had no foreign enemies to occupy his time, nor was disposed to enter into the common sports of peace, it was understood that he spent the greatest part of his time, when he was not in council, in the room where the picture hung. In truth, the image of the once smiling Daphles haunted him, wherever he went; and to ease himself of the yearning of wishing her alive again and seeing her face, he was in the habit of being with it as much as possible. His self-will turned upon him, even in that gentle shape. Millions of times did he wish back the loving author of his fortunes, whom he had treated with so clownish an ingratitude; and millions of times did the sense of the impotence of his wish run up in red hurry to his cheeks, and help to pull them into a gaunt melancholy. But this is not a repaying sorrow to dwell upon. He was one day, after being in vain expected at council, found lying madly on the floor of the room, dead. He had torn the portrait from the wall. His dagger was in his heart, and his cheek lay upon that blooming and smiling face, which, had it been living, would never have looked so at being revenged.

CHAPTER XXIII.

Spirit of the Ancient Mythology.

FROM having a different creed of our own, and always encountering the heathen mythology in a poetical and fabulous shape, we are apt to have a false idea of the religious feeling of the ancients. We are in the habit of supposing, whatever we allow when we come to reason upon the point, that they regarded their fables in the same poetical light as ourselves; that they could not possibly put faith in Jupiter, Neptune, and Pluto; in the sacrifice of innocent turtle-doves, the libation of wine, and the notions about Tartarus and Ixion.

Undoubtedly there were multitudes of free thinkers in the ancient world. Most of the Greek poets and philosophers appear to have differed with the literal notions of the many.* A system of refined theism is understood to have been taught to the initiated in the celebrated Mysteries. The doctrines of Epicurus were so prevalent in the most intellectual age of Rome, that Lucretius wrote a poem upon them, in which he treats their founder as a divinity; and Virgil, in the well-known passage of the Georgics, "Felix qui potuit," &c., exalts either Epicurus or Lucretius as a blessed being, who put hell and terro under his feet. A sickly temperament appears to have made him wish, rather than be able, to carry his own scepticism so far: yet he insinuates his belief in Tartarus, in the sixth book of his epic poem, where Eneas and the Sibyl, after the

It is remarkable that Eschylus and Euripides, the two dramatists whose faith in the national religion was most doubted, are said to have met with strange and violent deaths. The latter was torn to pieces by dogs, and the former killed by a tortoise which an eagle let fall upon his bald head, in mistake for a stone. These exits from the scene look very like the retributive death-beds which the bigots of all religions are so fond of ascribing to one another.

description of the lower world, go out through the ivory gate, which was the passage of false visions.* Cæsar, according to a speech of his in Sallust, derided the same notions in open senate; and Cicero, in other parts of his writings, as well as in a public pleading, speaks of them as fables and impertinence,"ineptiis ac fabulis."

But however this plain-dealing may look on the part of the men of letters, there is reason to believe, that even in those times, the people, in general, were strong upon the points of faith. The extension of the Greek philosophy may have insensibly rendered them familiar with latitudes of interpretation on the part of others. They would not think it impious in Cicero and Cato to have notions of the Supreme Being more consistent with the elevation of their minds. But for themselves, they adhered from habit, to the literal creed of their ancestors, as the Greek populace had done before them. The jealous enemies of Socrates contrived to have him put to death on a charge of irreverence for the gods. A frolic of the libertine Alcibiades, which, to say the least of it, was in bad taste-the defacing the statues of Mercury-was followed with important consequences. The history of Socrates had the effect, in after times, at least in the ancient world, of saving philosophical speculators from the vindictive egotism of opinion. But even in the days of Augus tus, Ovid wrote a popular work full of mythological fables ; and Virgil himself, whose creed, perhaps, only rejected what was unkindly, gave the hero of his intended popular epic the particular appellation of pious. That Augustus should pique himself on the same attribute proves little; for he was a coldblooded man of the world, and could play the hypocrite for the worst and most despotic purposes. Did he now and then lecture his poetical friends upon this point, respecting their own appear ances with the world? There is a curious ode of Horace (Book I., Ode xxxiv.), in which he says, that he finds himself compelled to give up his sceptical notions, and to attend more to public worship, because it had thundered one day when the

* Did Dante forget this, when he took Virgil for his guide through the Inferno ?

sky was cloudless. The critics are divided in their opinion of his object in this ode. Some think him in earnest, others in jest. It is the only thing of the sort in his works, and is, at all events, of an equivocal character, that would serve his purpose on either side of the question.

The opinions of the ancients upon religion may be divided into three general classes. The great multitude believed anything; the very few disbelieved everything; the philosophers and poets entertained a refined natural religion, which, while it pronounced upon nothing, rejected what was evidently unworthy of the spirit of creation, and regarded the popular deities as personifications of its various workings. All these classes had their extravagances, in proportion to their ignorance, or viciousness, or metaphysical perplexity. The multitude, whose notions were founded on ignorance, habit, and fear, admitted many absurd, and some cruel imaginations. The mere man of the world measured everything by his own vain and petty standard, and thought the whole goods of the universe a scramble for the cunning and hypocritical. The over-refining followers of Plato, endeavoring to pierce into the nature of things by the mere effort of the will, arrived at conclusions visible to none but their own yearning and impatient eyes, and lost themselves in the ethereal dogmatisms of Plotinus and Porphyry.

The greatest pleasure arising to a modern imagination from the ancient mythology, is in a mingled sense of the old popular belief and of the philosophical refinements upon it. We take Apollo, and Mercury, and Venus, as shapes that existed in popular credulity, as the greater fairies of the ancient world and we regard them at the same time, as personifications of all that is beautiful and genial in the forms and tendencies of creation. But the result, coming as it does, too, through avenues of beautiful poetry, both ancient and modern, is so entirely cheerful, that we are apt to think it must have wanted gravity to more believing eyes. We fancy that the old world saw nothing in religion but lively and graceful shapes, as remote from the more obscure and awful hintings of the world unknown, as physics appear to be from the metaphysical; as the eye of a

beautiful woman is from the inward speculations of a Brahmin; or a lily at noonday from the wide obscurity of night-time.

This supposition appears to be carried a great deal too far. We will not inquire, in this place, how far the mass of mankind, when these shapes were done away, did or did not escape from a despotic anthropomorphitism; nor how far they were driven by the vaguer fears, and the opening of a more visible eternity, into avoiding the whole subject, rather than courting it; nor how it is, that the nobler practical religion which was afforded them, has been unable to bring back their frightened theology from the angry and avaricious pursuits into which they fled for refuge. But, setting aside the portion of terror, of which heathenism partook in common with all faiths originating in uncultivated times, the ordinary run of pagans were perhaps more impressed with a sense of the invisible world, in consequence of the very visions presented to their imagination, than the same description of men under a more shadowy system. There is the same difference between the two things, as between a populace believing in fairies, and a populace not believing. The latter is in the high road to something better, if not drawn aside into new terrors on the one hand or mere worldliness on the other. But the former is led to look out of the mere worldly common-places about it, twenty times to the other's once. It has a sense of a supernatural state of things, however gross. It has a link with another world, from which something like gravity is sure to strike into the most cheerful heart. Every forest, to the mind's eye of a Greek, was haunted with superior intelligences. Every stream had its presiding nymph, who was thanked for the draught of water. Every house had its protecting gods, which had blessed the inmate's ancestors, and which would bless him also, if he cultivated the social affections for the same word which expressed piety towards the Gods expressed love towards relations and friends. If in all this there was nothing but the worship of a more graceful humanity, there may be worships much worse as well as much better. And the divinest spirit that ever appeared on earth has told us that the extension of human sympathy embraces all that is required of us, either to do or to foresee.