form of an ass, but as an ass he never appears.

There is no more mention of him in that character than of Orlando in the first seven books of Ariosto's famous song, or of the Fairy Queen in Spenser's poem. He will not ask Apollo to accompany him with the lyre for two reasons-first, that he would obtain nothing by his request; and second, that the accompaniment of a bray would spoil the harmony of the instrument. The strong force of mind and complete indifference to public opinion which ever distinguished him makes him say that he cares little for praise or blame, open or concealed, and confess his intention of sprinkling some of the poison of satire at a time when its proper objects are so numerous- —a heavy and despiteful time, when, without needing the eyes of Argus, one may see evil much sooner than good. Heaven itself shall not prevent his braying in such an hour.

The season of the poem is spring, the days when Dian begins her hunt. The poet finds himself in a wild wood at nightfall. Fear and darkness prevent his going farther, when he hears suddenly the harsh blast of a horn, and sees a sudden light. Soon a beautiful lady appears, with golden dishevelled hair, surrounded by a countless crowd of brutes of many kinds. The lady, with a simper, bids him good-evening as familiarly as though she had seen him a thousand times. She is one of the handmaidens of Circe, who, before Jove held his state, was compelled to abandon her ancient nest, and fled in avoidance of all human consort to this umbrageous wood. Here, hating mortals, and by them in turn hated, fed with the heavy sighs of this mighty drove, every beast of which was once a man, she holds her sad and solitary reign. This is all the description in the poem of Homer's "Circe," that fair-haired daughter of the sun, in the vestibule of whose house stood lions. wagging their tails, and strong-taloned wolves, while the goddess within sang with her silver voice, sitting before her loom. Macchiavelli, as will be seen, sets the servant in the place of the mistress, of whom there is no more mention. Some of the herd look at the poet as though to show him they too had once been men, and lick his feet for very sympathy of sorrow. Lest his human shape should be seen, Macchiavelli crawls on all-fours beneath the shoulders of a stag and of a bear, and so, like Ulysses in the Cyclops' cave, follows the footsteps of her he calls-as Tristram Shandy called Fortune-his Duchess. After wading through a wet ditch, which his guide passes by means of a bridge, he comes to a lofty palace. His Duchess then stables her herd, and, taking him by the hand, leads him into her private room, where she kindles a large fire to dry his dripping

clothes. He tells her she has saved his life, and that in her face he sees his supreme good. The Duchess replies that no one in ancient or modern times has ever suffered more ingratitude or greater hardship than Nicolo Macchiavelli. This, however, is not his own fault, but that of fortune. There is nothing in the world that remains constant. All things are like heaven, now dark, now clear ; all like the moon and stars, for ever moving without repose. Hence come peace and war, and the enmities of those in the same city. Happy times will return, wherein the poet may rejoice to tell the story of his past sufferings, but before these times Providence will have him, for his own good, changed into the form of a brute. Hitherto all things have been more or less gloomy; but after this comes a sudden change of style. Instead of a lurid Rembrandt, we have a smiling landscape of Lorraine, or rather a homely interior of Ostade. A cloth is spread on a table by the fireside, and a loaf, a fowl, a ready-dressed salad, and a decanter of excellent wine are produced from a convenient cupboard; for, says the Duchess, not without reason, to the poet, after kissing him ten times with open arms, if your constitution is not of steel, you will need a little refreshment. The poet having partaken, to borrow a flower from the occasional reporter, of refreshment, falls to describing the beauty of his hostess, to do which he is compelled after all to call on the aid of the Muses; and that lyre of Apollo, which he refused to ask for in the beginning of his poem, might have been useful in this emergency. Her hair is golden like a star's rays. Each eye is a flash of fire, extinguishing all mortal sight. No other hand than that of Jove could have fashioned her mouth. All the gods of heaven must have joined to frame her eyebrows. Her tongue quivers like a serpent between her lips and teeth. Her words make the grass grow and arrest the wind. For the rest of the description, and the concluding conversation of the night, Macchiavelli himself had some doubts about mentioning it. In these matters, he says, truth generally makes war against those who speak it. Still, the idea that a pleasure unrecorded is only half a pleasure, induces him to write some of the finest and most Dantesque verses in the poem, verses more passionate than those of Ariosto, equally gracious and sweet with those of Tibullus and Ovid, verses which, harmonising with the barbarous notions of modesty and imperfect ideas of delicacy of his age, cannot of course be now quoted. The cold night wanes, star after star pales and goes out, and the field of heaven is white when the Duchess leaves the poet to look after her drove. Alone, his mind reverts to past events, not yet hidden by the veil of time. In a word, he forgets both joys and sorrows in a political diatribe. The

cause of the changing fortune of states and kingdoms is the fact that the powerful are never satisfied with their power-Venice is an example. It had been better for St. Mark had he kept his back and tail under water. Athens and Sparta are other examples. They prepared their own ruin by that of others. Empires which begin in Ninus the divine, end in the effeminate Sardanapalus. Valour begets ease, ease disorder, disorder valour, and so on in a perpetual cycle. It has been, it is, and it always will be the case that evil grows out of good, and good out of evil. Macchiavelli is so fond of this axiom, that he has twice inserted it in this one poem. In the mean time the East blackens, and the sound of the distant horn announces the Duchess's return home. The remainder of the "Golden Ass " is a flagrant imitation of the "Inferno." The Duchess takes Nicolo by the hand as Virgil Dante, for Circe's meretricious handmaiden can hardly be compared with the modest celestial Beatrice, and by the aid of a dark lantern,

Che a suo piacere il lume scopre e tura,

discovers a long corridor, like that of a convent dormitory, at the end of which is the beasts' common-room. Over its entrance is a figure in marble of the Abbot of Gaeta, with a garland on his head, riding like a triumphant Hannibal on a mighty elephant. There is little doubt that the author alluded to one Baraballo, a common tale of the time, for his métromanie, to whom the festive Leo X. accorded, about a couple of years before the probable date of the poem, a mock ceremonial procession, in honour of his verse, through the streets of Rome. "His figure," says the Duchess, "is placed here to show the sort of people inside. Among them you will find many you knew well in the past." Coupling with this sentence the fact that Baraballo is also carved in wood on the door of one of the inner chambers of the Vatican, the reader may form his own conclusions as to the sort of beasts now offered in this ancient menagerie to the author's view. They are in number over two thousand. Among them is a prudent well-born cat, who allowed by negligence his prey to escape him; a wolf not to be taken by any net; a dog barking at the moon; a lion who has in his folly drawn his own teeth and claws, an operation probably of some little difficulty; a giraffe, an animal then lately introduced, bending his long neck to one and all; a snoring bear; a short-sighted blood-hound; a snow-white goose; some hundred owls; an ermine, who would allow none to look at him far less touch him, sitting by the side of a lark; a peacock letting the world slide while he admires the glory of his tail; and an ass not able to bear his own saddle, like a cucumber in August. But the greatest

part of the beasts are a mixture between a rabbit and a goat. A couple of stanzas are here omitted in all editions, probably owing to the exertions of some great man who had suffered from their sting. To this satire of Macchiavelli's on his contemporaries, contemporary malice lent a charm it no longer possesses. With the factions of the Medici its main interest, and indeed intelligibility, is gone. But, as Voltaire said, he who possessed the key to this apocalypse would be the master of the secret history of Florence of that time. With a sigh the poet sees how many a man, who appeared to him a Fabius or a Cato, is here the merest silly sheep. But he turns and beholds a fat hog over three hundred pounds in weight, whose face is streaked with mud and dung. Him, too, he claims in sorrow as an old acquaintance, and into his mouth is put, half in jest, half in earnest, the most remarkable and piquant idea in the poem, an able development of the paradox, that brutes are better off than men.

In Plutarch's commentary about the comparative skill of land. animals and water animals, all brutes are credited with reason and intelligence, but weak and turbid as the sight of a dull and mistaffected eye. In a conversation by the same author, between Ulysses, Circe, and Gryllus, the goddess, after twitting the Cephallenian king with his silly preference of an old woman and misery to herself and immortality, allows him to offer Gryllus an opportunity of regaining his human form. The good Gryllus, however, is so far from wishing to become a man, that he censures Ulysses for not becoming a pig. That cunning hero he compares to a peevish child, who refuses to be made whole by medicine. "I," says Gryllus, "have tried both existences, and ought to know which is the better." He then shows that man is far inferior to the beast in the three cardinal virtues, prudence, and justice, and fortitude. Gryllus, for example, spurns as common stone that gold and silver for which men commit all wickedness, and Gryllus sleeps more sweetly, when full of food, on a heap of soft deep dung, than on a bed rich with purple tapestry and stiff brocade. "Away, then," he concludes," and leave me to a life affluent in means, nor seek to persuade me to become again a man, than whom no animal is more prone to misery." The conversation is unhappily unfinished, but, so far as it goes, Gryllus decidedly has the best of it. Some of the arguments of the metamorphosed Greek the fat and filthy hog repeats to Macchiavelli in this poem, and adds more of his own. Has man, he asks, the eye of the eagle? or the nose or ear of the dog? he provided with any natural defence? Does he not begin his life in tears, which no pig does; and what is that life in length,

Is

compared to the life of the stag, the rook, or the goose? True, man has head and speech, but has he not also ambition and avarice? One pig injures not another, but man is robbed, clubbed to death, and crucified by man. "How then," concludes this wise pig, "should I desire to become again a man, being free of all the miseries I endured in my human form? Believe me, however rich, and happy, an divine man's state may seem, I live far happier in this mud, wherein I bathe and wallow at my ease." Such is the strange conclusion of the unfinished "Golden Ass." It becomes silent, like Herodotus, just when our curiosity is most excited. With the moral philosophy of the last chapter we may well compare that part of Pope's Essay on Man, in which he places instinct, which Addison called the immediate education of Providence, above reason; the volunteer instinct which needs no pope nor council, and must go right above the pressed reason, which does unwilling work and may go wrong. Fénelon and La Fontaine have also given some excellent sentences on this subject. The fabulist has extended the canvas of his predecessors. No pig appears, but Ulysses, the representative of human wisdom, offers enfranchisement to a lion, a bear, and a wolf. They all with one accord begin to make excuse. "Shall I, the king of the woods, become a citizen of Ithaca ?" answers the lion. "Am I so ugly in the eyes of my mistress; and who made you a judge of shape?" replies the bear. But the best response by far is that of the wolf, who, being charged with the slaughter of divers muttons, says sarcastically, “Should I then love carnage less were I a man? No, all things considered, I main tain

'Que scélérat pour scélérat,

Il veut mieux être un loup qu'un homme."

The good Archbishop of Cambray, for his part, confesses that men would indeed be worse off than beasts if they were not sustained by the only true religion. Man's sublime hopes are not shared, in the opinion of the archbishop, by beasts. He claims a sole exclusive heaven for man, an immortality in which no part or lot is to be allowed to any lion, or pig, or wolf, or bear. The archbishop's pig, a pious pig, an animal evidently not altogether lost, confesses the seductions of a Christian after-life, but laughs to open scorn the pagan elysium of Greece and Rome. In other respects he differs little from the pig of Macchiavelli. His French education leads him, however, to attach greater importance to externals. His figure, he confesses, may be loathsome, but then he has no vanity leading him to look into a glass. Nay, he prefers even a muddy pool. He needs no barber; he is clothed without a tailor, and fed without a cook.