times question himself: sometimes blaming himself for ills that he had not been able to prevent; sometimes going back behind events, and weighing anew the different determinations he might have made. The purest enjoyments of life were poisoned for him by the unheard-of persecutions of party spirit. This party spirit showed itself even in the manner in which émigrés in the time of their need addressed themselves to him to ask help. Many of them writing to him for this purpose, excused themselves for not going to see him, on the plea that the most important personages of their party had forbidden their doing so; they judged truly at least of the generosity of M. Necker, when they believed that this submission to the violence of their leaders would not deter him from being of use to them.

After years so full of grief, so full of virtue, the power of loving seemed to increase in my father at the age when it diminishes in other men; and everything about him declared, when life ended, his return to heaven.

I

PERSECUTIONS BY NAPOLEON

From Ten Years of Exile>

and

N THE month of March, 1811, a new Prefect [of Geneva] arrived from Paris. He was a man peculiarly adapted to the conditions of the time; that is to say, possessing a great knowledge of facts, and no principles with regard to rule, placing his conscience in devotion to power. The first time that I saw him he said to me immediately that a talent like mine was made to celebrate the Emperor,- that he was a subject worthy of the kind of enthusiasm that I had shown in 'Corinne.' I answered him, that persecuted as I had been by the Emperor, any praise on my part addressed to him would have the air of a petition; and that I was persuaded that the Emperor himself would find my eulogiums absurd in such conditions. He opposed this opinion vehemently; he came again several times to see me, to beg me (for the sake of my interests, he said) to write something for the Emperor. Were it not more than four pages, that would suffice, he assured me, to put an end to all my troubles.

XXIII-866

And what he said to me he repeated to all my acquaintances. At last one day he came proposing that I should sing the birth of the King of Rome. I answered him, with laughter, that I had no thought to express on this subject beyond my wishes that his nurse might be a good one. This jest put an end to the prefect's negotiations with me, as to the necessity that I should write. something in favor of the government.

A short time after, the physicians ordered my youngest son the baths of Aix in Savoy, twenty miles from Coppet. Scarcely had I been there ten days, when a courier from the prefect of Geneva brought me orders to return home. The prefect of Mont Blanc where I was [i. e., in whose prefecture she was], also was afraid, he said, that I might set off from Aix to go to England, to write against the Emperor; and although London was not very near Aix in Savoy, he sent his gendarmes over the road to forbid my being provided with post-horses. I am ready to laugh now at all this prefectorial activity directed against such an insignificant object as myself; but then I was ready to die at the sight of a gendarme. I was always fearing that from so rigorous an exile the next step might easily be a prison, more terrible to me than death. I knew that once arrested, once this scandal dared, the Emperor would permit no word to be spoken for me, had any one had the courage to attempt it, a courage scarcely probable in his court, where terror reigns every moment of the day, and about every detail of life.

I returned to Geneva; and the prefect informed me that not only he forbade me to go under any pretext into the countries adjoining France, but that he advised me not to travel in Switzerland, and never to venture more than two leagues in any direction from Coppet. I observed to him that having my domicile in Switzerland, I did not well understand by what right a French authority could forbid my traveling in a foreign country. He thought me, undoubtedly, rather a simpleton to discuss in those days a question of right; and he repeated his advice, which was singularly akin to an order. I held to my remonstrance; but the next day I learned that one of the most distinguished men of letters of Germany, M. Schlegel, who for eight years had been good enough to take charge of the education of my sons, had just received the order not only to leave Geneva but also

Coppet. I was desirous to represent once more that in Switzerland the prefect of Geneva could give no orders [Geneva was then under French rule]: but I was told that if I liked better that this order should come from the French ambassador, I could so have it: that this ambassador would address himself to the landamman, and the landamman to the canton de Vaud, and the authorities of the canton would turn M. Schlegel out of my house. By forcing despotism to take this roundabout way, I should have gained ten days; but nothing more. I asked to know

why I was deprived of the society of M. Schlegel, my friend, and that of my children. The prefect - who was accustomed, like most of the Emperor's agents, to connect very gentle phrases with very harsh acts-told me that it was from consideration for me that the government removed from my house M. Schlegel, who made me unpatriotic. Truly touched by this paternal care on the part of the government, I inquired what M. Schlegel had done inimical to France: the prefect spoke of his literary opinions, and among other things, of a brochure by him, in which, comparing the 'Phædra' of Euripides to that of Racine, he gave the preference to the former. It showed much delicate feeling in a monarch of Corsican birth, to take sides in this manner about the finer details of French literature. But the truth was, M. Schlegel was exiled because he was my friend, because his conversation animated my solitude; the system was beginning to be worked that was to manifest itself more clearly, of making for me a prison of my soul, by depriving me of all the enjoyments of society and of friendship.

ONE

ROME ANCIENT AND MODERN

From Corinne'

NE of the most singular churches in Rome is St. Paul's: its exterior is that of an ill-built barn; yet it is bedecked within by eighty pillars of such exquisite material and proportion that they are believed to have been transported from an Athenian temple described by Pausanias. If Cicero said in his day, "We are surrounded by vestiges of history," what would he say now? Columns, statues, and pictures are so prodigally crowded in the churches of modern Rome, that in St. Agnes's, bas-reliefs turned face downward serve to pave a staircase; no

one troubling himself to ascertain what they might represent. How astonishing a spectacle was ancient Rome, had its treasures been left where they were found! The immortal city would be still before us nearly as it was of yore; but could the men of our day dare to enter it? The palaces of the Roman lords are vast in the extreme, and often display much architectural grace; but their interiors are rarely arranged in good taste. They have none of those elegant apartments invented elsewhere for the perfect enjoyment of social life. Superb galleries, hung with the chefs-d'œuvre of the tenth Leo's age, are abandoned to the gaze of strangers by their lazy proprietors, who retire to their own obscure little chambers, dead to the pomp of their ancestors, as were they to the austere virtues of the Roman republic. The country-houses give one a still greater idea of solitude, and of their owners' carelessness amid the loveliest scenes of nature. One walks immense gardens, doubting if they have a master; the grass grows in every path, yet in these very alleys are the trees cut into shapes, after the fantastic mode that once reigned in France. Strange inconsistency-this neglect of essentials and affectation in what is useless! Most Italian towns, indeed, surprise us with this mania, in a people who have constantly beneath their eyes such models of noble simplicity. They prefer glitter to convenience; and in every way betray the advantages and disadvantages of not habitually mixing with society. Their luxury is rather that of fancy than of comfort. Isolated among themselves, they dread not that spirit of ridicule, which in truth seldom penetrates the interior of Roman abodes. Contrasting this with what they appear from without, one might say that they were rather built to dazzle the peasantry than for the reception of friends.

Translation of Isabel Hill.

STATIUS

(45-96 A. D. ?)

BY WILLIAM CRANSTON LAWTON

UBLIUS PAPINIUS STATIUS, epic, lyric, and dramatic poet, was born at Naples about the middle, and died there about the

end, of the first century A. D. Neither date can be fixed. His last volume of verse was published at Naples in 95. He flourished especially however at Rome, under the capricious and cruel emperor Domitian. He and Martial testify eloquently to their mutual jealousy by making no mention each of the other. Juvenal marks him as a thriftless adventurer; saying he might well have starved had not Paris, the popular actor, bought his farce. Of these things we know no more. Statius himself launched his hopes of eternal fame with his long-wrought epic on the tragical story of Thebes.

The four ponderous epics still extant, dating from the first century of our era, give us little reason to regret the loss of the numberless heavy galleons besides that have sunk into utter forgetfulness. Whether patriotically Roman in subject, like the ventures of Lucan and Silius Italicus, or rebuilt from Greek materials like Valerius Flaccus's 'Argonautica' and Statius's 'Thebaid,' the four survivors plainly follow the track of the stately flagship, the 'Eneid' - but far and far astern!

For several reasons there is perhaps no passage in the poem more pleasing than the closing lines of the Thebaid':

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After the long sea-journey my vessel hath won her the harbor.
Shalt thou afar survive to be read, outliving thy master,

O my 'Thebaid,' watched for twice six years without ceasing?
Verily Fame already has smoothed thy favoring pathway;
Cæsar, the noble-spirited, deigns already to know thee,
Eager is now the Italian youth to read and proclaim thee!
Live, I pray: nor yet draw nigh to the sacred 'Eneid':

Follow thou, rather, afar, and always worship her footprints.

This same repellent subject, the tale of Thebes, like "Pelops's line, and the tale of Troy divine," had been constantly reworked since the earliest dawn of Greek poetry. Hardly one prominent incident indeed in these twelve long books- nearly ten thousand hexameter verses can have brought a sense of pleased surprise to the jaded