The head was carried to the king, and subsequently embalmed, for an object that will presently appear.

The tragedy of Pompey the Great was over and actors and spectators quitted the scene. His fleet had long ago plucked up anchors and fled; * and darkness was falling on the deserted shore. This is the moment chosen by the poet for grave reflexions, whose impressiveness is best rendered by prose:

'With the same punctiliousness with which Fortune perfected the prosperity of Pompey did she strike him to death from the pinnacle of power, and on a single merciless day exact in payment all the miseries from which she had given him so many years exempt. Thus Pompey had never both joys and sorrows mingled in his cup-happy with no god to trouble him, wretched with none to spare him. Fortune long held her stroke and struck but once. He is tossed on the sands, torn by the rocks; the waves pour through his wounds; the sea makes him its sport; and, as no shape is left him, the one sign that he is Pompey the Great is the neck from which the head has been torn' (701-711.)

It is night and the moon is dim; † but another figure may be descried upon the shore. This is Cordus, who, according to Lucan, the earliest, perhaps the only witness to the statement, played a part which others, as Plutarch (c. 80), assigned to Pompey's freedman Philippus, but in which it is probable that both were associated, since Plutarch speaks of an old Roman who had served with Pompey as taking part in the burial. Cordus, we are told, had been the quæstor of Pompey in his earlier days. The relation of a quæstor to his chief, as we know from Cicero, was all but a filial one; and thus Cordus seemed designated to perform the last pious offices to the body now tossing on the shoals (721–728):

'All faint, sad Cynthia glimmered thro' the cloud;
But 'mid the grey surf darkly showed the trunk.
Round the dead chief enlacing arms he wound,
Baulking the robber seas.

Then, spent with toil,

The vessel on which were Cornelia and Sextus escaped; most, if not all, of the rest were captured and those they carried killed.

The moon is an embellishment of the poet's. Our astronomer royal assures me that on the night of the murder she would not rise till nearly dawn.

Waited the waves; and, dry land won at last,
Bending above and weeping o'er each wound
Thus spake to heaven and the darkling stars.'

His appeal to the ruthless powers is in substance this. The favourite of Fortune sues not now for the pomp and pageant of the public funeral that is his meed; he asks no more than the meagre rites accorded to the lowest of the low. It is penalty enough that his wife can pay none of the last tributes to her husband, so near and yet so far away.

The burning of the body is then described (743-775). The account contains nothing incredible, and one of its incidents the confirmation of other writers proves to have been historical.

So spake the warrior when afar he spied

A small death-fire that burned a friendless corse,

Unwatched. Thence snatched he flame and from the limbs
The charred logs drawing, "Poor unknown," he said,
"Though slighted and forgot of all thy friends,
Yet happier thou than Pompey, pardon if
Thy ordered pile a stranger hand invade.
If death leaves aught of feeling, then unasked
Thou'lt quit the pyre and gladly bear this loss,
Ashamed to burn by Pompey's graveless corse."
So said, his arms with burning faggots filled,
He flies back to the trunk, which on the marge
Swayed, all but now recovered by the waves.
He parts the top sand, hastily from far
Gathers the breakage of a shattered hull
And in the slight trench lays it. But no wood
Upheld the noble limbs, no builded pyre,
And near, not under Pompey stole the flames.
Then seated by the fire, "Great Chief," he cried,
"Sole sovran splendour of Hesperia's race,
If more than tossing seas or earth denied
This pyre mislike thee, ghost and potent wraith
Turn thou from these poor offices away.

'Tis Fate's wrongdoing makes them rightly done.
And lest sea-monster, beast or bird of prey,
Or spite of cruel Cæsar outrage dare,

Take all thou may'st, this fire. A Roman's hand
Enkindles thee. If to Hesperia's shores

My fortune grant return, these holy ashes

Shall bide no longer in this resting place.
Cornelia, Pompey, shall receive them home
And from my arms shall pour them in the urn.
With a small stone meanwhile I'll mark the shore
To show the grave to whoso shall design
T'appease the slain, death's tributes rendering
Without abridgement, that his quest may find
The ashes of the trunk and know the strand
Whither with Pompey's head he must repair.'

All night the body burns, nor is it ashes when the first rays of light give warning to the watchers that their task must end. The smouldering remains are hurriedly quenched with water taken from the sea and buried under a little heap of earth. A stone is placed above to keep it in position. On the stone the brief inscription HIC SITVS EST MAGNVs (Here lies Great Pompey) is scored with a half-burnt faggot. This done, Cordus departed; but Philippus, it would appear, remained. For Plutarch tells us that Lucius Lentulus, who had left Cyprus after Pompey and was sailing along the coast in ignorance of the catastrophe, descrying the funeral pile and the freedman who stood beside it, exclaimed before he knew the truth, Who, I wonder, is this unfortunate that has paid the debt of fate?' and again after a pause and with a sigh, 'What if it be you, Great Pompey?' Before long he landed, when he was at once arrested and put to death in prison.

.

Pompey was murdered on Sept. 28, B.C. 48;* on the following day-the anniversary of his great triumph over Mithridates and the Pirates-he would have completed his 58th year. His head, whose features were hardly recognisable, together with his signet ring, a lion grasping a sword, was reserved as an offering to the victor, who reached Alexandria towards the beginning of October. Cæsar, with an emotion which the Pompeian poet insinuates was assumed, but which may well have been sincere, turned away from the grisly spectacle and ordered the head an honourable burial. It was not interred with the remains of the trunk, but placed in a

* That is, according to the unreformed Roman Calendar; the real date was July 25. The confusion has misled Lucan, who makes Pompey's arrival in Egypt coincide with the autumnal equinox (VIII, 467–469).

small shrine on a plot of ground outside the city, thence known as the Enclosure of Nemesis. This was destroyed (so Appian tells us) by the Jews in their great revolt in the last year of the Emperor Trajan, 117 A.D.; but the association of Pompey with the Egyptian capital lived on, as it would appear, and attached itself to the great obelisk now known as 'Pompey's Pillar,' but really erected to commemorate the siege of the city by Diocletian.

At some time or other, according to Plutarch (c. 80 fin.), Cornelia was permitted to remove her husband's remains to Italy and reinter them on his estate near Alba. The specific statement may conceivably be true; but it can hardly be questioned that for the world at large his ashes continued to rest in the hostile soil where the humble grave, with bronze figures of the dead placed around it by his kinsfolk, was one of the sights of Egypt, until it was buried under the drifting sand. This was its condition when the Emperor Hadrian in A.D. 130 paid a visit to the spot and had the grave restored and the images, which had been maltreated and removed to the neighbouring shrine of Jupiter Casius, renovated and replaced. Lucan, too, must have shared the popular belief. Otherwise there is little meaning in the magnificent funeral oration (such in fact it is) which he pronounces over the grave of his hero, and the closing lines of which (865-872) may fitly conclude this article:

"The hour shall come when loss of during tomb
And marbles labouring high shall be thy gain,
Ere time be agèd much, this scanty heap
Of dust be scattered, fallen lie the stone,
And all the arguments of thy death be dead.
A brighter age shall dawn, our sons refuse
All credence to the guides that show the grave,
And Egypt, maybe, deem as arrantly
For Pompey's grave to lie as Crete for Jove's.'

J. P. POSTGATE

Art. 4.-HENRY JAMES.

THE life that an artist lives within the borders of his art, the adventure of his imagination, has never been more fully set forth than it is in the work of Henry James. He has left, in the long and unbroken succession of his books, what is surely the most complete of all statements of the 'literary case,' as he might have called it himself. It is a statement, in the first place, by a man intenselyamong masters of our own tongue, at any rate, one may as well say uniquely-aware of the nature of his task, a critic who took up the most haphazard of literary forms and turned it into the most ordered and finished; a statement, moreover, even in an age of ready writers, lavishly detailed and voluminous. A fastidiously critical gift is supposed to mean sterility in production; most kinds of fluency can only cover the ground by neglecting many scruples. Henry James not only neglected none, but he cultivated them, as some thought, beyond the limit of fanaticism. Yet his work is no slender growth, checked and hampered in its movement by so much care, but a broad and gathering stream, flowing steadily year by year and in full view, as unlike as possible to the rare and curious possession bequeathed to an enlightened few.

This very amplitude of his work, coupled with the fact of its increasing closeness of texture, is enough to prove that Henry James, in his search for perfection of form, faced towards the open, absorbing, for his peculiar use, an ever stronger and deeper impression of humanity. He was immensely fastidious, but his detestation of what was obvious or stale was as far as could be from making him shy of the touch of life. He rather exposed himself to it, with appreciative deliberation, more and more; and there was no one to whom every moment of experience appeared so thickly populous. All who knew him must recall the splendid freedom with which he would throw open his imagination to receive the lightest appeal. This freedom, it is true, was in no way casual or promiscuous; nothing about him was ever that. Anything that might be offered him, sight or suggestion or play of thought, which was without character, without style, futile, insignificant, he swept from him in scorn. But for whatever had substance and reality, or was marked with the