bags. The goat's hair was the counterpart of that of the Bootian youth: it was the very thing—an interference of the gods to save her; she snatched a handful of it, and hurried home to her mistress. Unthinking Fotis! no sooner was the terrible spell set working, than the burning locks took effect on their proper owners. The inflated skins, coerced by the mystic forces, received human breath, and power, and motion; obedient to the summons, they were struggling their way to the presence of the charmer, who was expecting a very different visitor, when Lucius, full of wine, had arrived upon the scene.

After such an adventure, one would think Lucius must have had enough of witchcraft, and thenceforth might have gone about his business like an ordinary man. But no-he must complete his destiny! In the strongest sense of the metaphor, he had been made an ass of; and, having earned a complete transformation, the justice of the gods awards him his deserts.

He will only forgive the penitent damsel on condition of a further initiation into the mysteries; and an occasion is not long in offering itself. A few nights after the festival, Fotis comes running unto him to say that now was his time to witness the grandest of secrets. Pamphila, disappointed of seeing her lover at her own house, was about to convey herself to his; and Lucius, through a chink in the floor of an upper-room, to which Fotis conducts him, beholds her anoint herself with a certain ointment, mutter some magical words, and, in a few moments, in the shape of an owl, fly out of the window. Nothing will satisfy him but that he, too, must try the same experiment. Much against her will, he compels poor Fotis to procure him the ointment; and, stripping off his clothes, he covers himself with it from head to foot. In an agony of hope he awaits his transformation; and it comes; but, alas! alas! far other from what he looked for. Instead of the fair brown feathers, a grey down shoots out over his face and body; his ears prolong themselves infinitely upwards, and a wonderful appendage he feels dangling behind him. Fotis had brought the wrong box; in a few seconds the metamorphosis is complete-he is standing on his four legs a finished ass.

As to whether there was any adventure of his own which Apuleius was intending to satirize; whether the marriage business, after all, turned out ill, and Pudentilla dealt hardly with him; history is happily silent. There is something suspicious in the celibate vow which is connected with his ultimate restoration, and the passionate eagerness with which it is assumed provokes our curiosity; but there is nothing to build upon, and it is wanton to take away the character of a marriage which he was himself at so much pains to clear.

For the adventures of the hero under his transformation, which form the substance of the rest of the book, at any rate there is no scandal in them. They are no more than a succession of pictures of the world of the time, drawn very skilfully from an ass's point of view, who, after all, is not altogether the ass which he seems. His first impulse, on discovering his misfortune, is to destroy the unlucky author of it. From this he is restrained by a prudent recollection, that if he kills her she will not be able to help him back to his manhood. She then tells him, that his restoration depends on a very simple condition; he had only to eat a new-blown rose, and all will be well again. A single night threatened to be the longest which he would have to wait; a series of misadventures prolong his penance for a year. A few hours after his metamorphosis, the house of Milo is attacked by robbers. The plunder is divided between the backs of our friend and his horse, who are driven off with it to the mountains; and, thenceforward, upwards and downwards, from pillar to post, through evil report and good report, the poor creature is kicked to and fro through a hard world, under masters of all kinds-robbers, country gentlemen, peasants, tradesmen, soldiers, howling dervishes, and all other representative' classes of the day-meeting ever, under all his changes, with one fate, which never changes, incessant cudgelling.

Very humorously, too, the understanding of the creature is tempered like that of the fools of the medieval courts-the keen wit in motley dress, to his new shape of brain; but his wisdom is rather for every one else than for himself; and if ever ass carned his beatings, he does. But the hero's adventures form no more than the central fibre of the book. As in the 'Arabian Nights,' story winds within story, strung at intervals like jewels on the chain; we have tales of robbers, of witches, of necromancers, of domestic crimes; then there are fairy tales, the wellknown beautiful one of Cupid and Psyche, of which we shall have more to say presently; and, directly and indirectly, the entire private life of that old world is laid out before us; the way men lived, what they talked about, what amused them, what employed them; what they hoped, feared, or believed. The season passes before the fatal rose can be brought within reach of Lucius. Then comes the winter with none, and hopes of none. He submits to the inevitable, and drudges patiently on; for a time forgetting, as it seems, that he was anything more than he appeared. And so from hand to hand, till at last, while waiting outside the amphitheatre at Corinth, where he was himself to exhibit as soon as the lions had done eating a questionable woman (it was the practice with the authorities, when any benevolent person would go to the expense of a popular entertainment,

to make over the refuse of the prisons to him to help out the fun), and not feeling easy that his own sleek skin might not prove over-tempting to them, it struck him that, while the attention of every one was drawn off, he might as well run away. He gallops off along the road till he reaches Cenchrea; and then, enchanted, he flings himself down on the sands to sleep. Like Ulysses laid sleeping on the shores of Ithaca, he wakes to find that he has reached unconsciously the period of his labours. The goddess Isis has floated in upon his dreams, with a beneficent promise, that on his awakening he will see her procession on the shore. One of her priests will bear a chaplet of fresh roses; he was to advance boldly, and take one; and that he might find no difficulty, she was present at the same moment, she tells him, in the dreams of the priest, to prepare him. On eating the blessed rose, he was to be Lucius once more, and was ever after to consider himself devoted to her service. All which follows happily according to the divine promise; and the book ends with an account of the inauguration of Lucius-in other words, of Apuleius himself into the service successively of Isis and Osiris, and, last of all, of Serapis; the triple initiation into the triple mystery accompanied, as we said, with the somewhat remarkable vow of celibacy. The favours of these great persons, however, are not reserved for another life; and we are not to confound celibacy with ascetism. No more is intended than a free batchelor's life; and that there may be no lack of means for the full enjoyment of it, Osiris undertakes to provide his servant with ample work and ample pay in his profession of pleader in the Forum.

Such in outline is the Golden Ass' of Apuleius, a novel once wonderfully popular. The Fathers saw in it the hand of Antichrist; Augustine doubted whether it were not a real history of diabolic machinations. At the revival of letters, it took a front place in public interest, and it is the lineal progenitor of many novels, and those the best of their kind, Oriental as well as European. Raffael painted from it; Cervantes borrowed from it, so did afterwards Le Sage, very largely. Perhaps, our Shakespere found in it his conception of Bottom; there is a passionate apostrophe to the ass on the lips of a young lady; which is too like Titania's to be accidental; and Sir Philip Sydney speaks admiringly of it in his Defence of Poesy.' There is hardly a better measure of the buoyancy of a book, than the quantity of notes which it is capable of floating; and into one of the early printed editions, a foolish editor was able to cram several hundred pages, de omni scibili. Of late years, the interest has ebbed again. In the abundance of novels of native growth, there has been, before the present translator took it in hand, no English version of Apuleius; and a better taste has

directed classical students to more really excellent writers. Now that it has appeared, however, in a form accessible to professed novel readers, the most indolent of them may destroy an hour or two over it with as much pleasure, and at least as much profit, as over the last novel of George Sand, or Sir Lytton Bulwer. And, with readers of another class, it is possible that it may regain its old place on different grounds from those on which its previous reputation rested; not on its merits as a novel, but on the historic importance of the age of which it is the picture: an importance which is every day growing perceptibly larger. We are learning better to study history as a whole, to trace its organic laws in the recurrence of remarkable phenomena, and to observe in the moral aspect of the various eras, the future which the event proved to be involved in them. From this point of view, the second century, or that immediately preceding the final decay of the Roman Empire, becomes every day of graver import to us. The executive powers, which appeared so strong, were sick of a mortal disease, old modes of thought were passing away, and in their decay the soil was forming, in which the modern life was planted to grow. Out of the midst of it, in it, but not of it,' the awful religion of Christ was rising. This was the world which it went out to subdue; the world against which the saints of the purest age, the men who drew up our creeds, and ordered our Scriptures, were contending; the world which they denounced and execrated, and which in its turn martyred them; and in the dearth of history and of poetry, this book of Apuleius'-if we except Plutarch's Symposia '—is, perhaps, the only description from the Pagan side of what it was. The Fathers revile its vices; but the lights fall all one way, and in the intensity of their indignation common shapes throw monstrous shadows. In Apuleius we see the same scenes, but with the shadows partially illuminated; and between them the real thing lies with some distinctness before us.

There it is, a great age, rich and prosperous externally beyond any which the world as yet had known. The peaceful earth slumbered; the war-drum throbbed no longer;' to the enthusiastic eyes of Elihu Burritt it would have seemed the inauguration of the millennium. An age of commerce and manufacture―men going to and fro on their business and their pleasure; abundant in comforts for the body, in fancy religions for the soul; a huge rotting world, without faith in God or man, across whose debased and debasing spirit not any one noble thought, or hope, or aspiration, ever passed-no politic factions troubled the night slumbers-no patriots were agitated with dreams of independence. The empire was bound together by force, or by what was left of the organic cords which were twisted in the old noble times; but

the last strands were wearing through, and were soon to part for

ever.

With how thin a varnish even of the sort of well-being which he valued, Mr. Gibbon was deceived, the few extracts which we are about to give will serve to show. Here, for instance, is one of the absolute power under the direction of absolute wisdom,' an official picture of the results in detail of centralization; the youthful guardian of public justice being, probably, some younger son of a noble family who had to be provided for.' The scene is obviously from life. On his arrival at Hypata, Lucius, distrusting the extent of Milo's hospitality, and wishing to secure himself a supper, goes into the market to buy fish, when the chaffering and the results of the chaffering between a gentleman and a fishmonger are such as might have been expected. As he is going off with his purchase, he meets an old friend who is in office as inspector of provisions. The basket is examined, and the price inquired into. The inspector, on learning it, hurries back his friend to the scene of his bargain, when, by way of administering justice, the following ensues :

"Now tell me," said he, "who sold you this good-for-nothing fish?"

I pointed to a little old man, sitting in one corner of the Forum; upon which Pytheas (so the inspector was called), immediately began to harangue the old man severely.

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"What now," said he, in a very imperial tone of voice to the fishmonger, hast thou no mercy left in thee, neither for our friends nor for strangers, to ask such an exorbitant price for thy pitiful fish? Truly, now if you persist to raise the price of articles in the market after this fashion, our city, now the flower of the province of Thessaly, will be deserted like a rock on a wilderness, from the dearness of provisions. But I'll make you smart for it; nay, I will teach you how rogues are dealt with, while I am a magistrate.'

So saying, Pytheas, without more ado, emptied the basket in the middle of the road, and bade one of his attendants trample the fish under his feet till they were all crushed in pieces; which act having been performed to my friend's satisfaction, he, contented with the moral discipline inflicted on the fishmonger, recommended me to leave the Forum; "for," said he, "Lucius, I have sufficiently disgraced the little old fellow, and I am satisfied."

I, on the contrary, was astonished, and almost in a state of stupefaction at thus being, owing to the sage advice of my schoolfellow, deprived at once of my money and my supper.'

So much for the wisdom of the provincial administrators. But the system could only be carried on through a military despotism, and the lords of the empire were unable to secure the poorer and weaker part of the population from the rapacity