of their own executive. What a story is that of the poor gardener! He is driving his ass along the road, when a bullying soldier of the legion meets him and takes a fancy to it. To take a fancy to a thing, and to take the thing itself, were identical with the soldiers of the later empire. A scuffle follows, in which the aggressor gets the worst of it; but the gardener had to pay in his person for defending his property. The soldier, with the help of his companions, and backed by the authority of the magistrate (of easy belief when a legionary was the complainant), not only took forcible possession of the desired animal, but flung his owner into prison for assault on his sacred self.

Here, again, is a picture of the condition of the operatives' in a wholesale baking establishment, given by Lucius, when introduced there in his condition of an ass :

The curiosity of my nature overpowered every other sensation, and I actually refrained from eating in order to look around me. I viewed with an eagerness amounting to painful delight, the discipline of our abominable workshop; what a miserable stunted set of human beings did I see before me-creatures, ye gracious gods! whose lacerated backs and shoulders shaded, rather than covered, with ragged clothes, were marked black and blue with wheals; their heads half shaved, their foreheads, branded with letters; their faces of ghastly paleness; their eyes, from the vaporous heat of dark smoky chambers, sore and rheumy; their eyelids glued together; and their ankles encompassed with heavy iron rings; the flesh of the greater portion was visible through the rents and fissures of their tattered garments; while the entire bodies of the remainder, naked, with the exception of a slender covering about the waist, were sprinkled over with a dirty mixture of flower and ashes, like the dust of an amphitheatre.'

So it ever is and ever will be; the strongest centralized despotism will fail to make a world of selfish men move wisely and justly. No system of order can be so contrived but that the cunning knave can use it for his own advantage, and the weaker will still go to the wall, whether the weakness be in position, in intellect, or in body. The only difference between disturbed times and times of such peace as this, is in the forms which selfishness assume; in the first, strength of arm prospers; in the second, strength of wit or cunning; and in some respects the first is the better of the two, as the lion and the leopard are nobler brutes than the jackal and the hyæna. Nay, in this second century, whatever nobleness there was left in the unchristian world, had absolutely forsaken the decent part of the community and had gone over to the devil's regiments,' the banditti, with which the mountains were peopled; and the truest existing representative of the old Spartan virtue, is to be found in the

robber Trasyleo, in his bearskin, dying without a groan, that he may not betray his comrades.

The profound peace of the provinces was no result of a contented submission to a strong and healthy government; but an easy acquiesence in evil; they had ceased to be conscious of it, because they had ceased to care for good, and evil therefore had ceased to be painful to them. Not to dwell upon the witchcraft, there is another infallible symptom of the corruption of the age in the frequency of poisoning. Between mesmerism and poison, there was scarcely a family in the empire but could have provided materials for a modern French novel, with commonly also the same exciting central figure to give it zest and point; a fair lady, unhappy under the tyranny of a law which deprives her of the right to dispose of her own proper person; a husband, whose crime is an objection to his wife's theory on the subject; a lover, ready to supply the husband's place when he is disposed of; and again, himself to follow the husband when the lady's free will requires a novel stimulant.

And

Crime, under the early Cæsars, was the privilege of the imperial or patrician families; and the provinces had degenerated from what they were in the age from Augustine to Vespasian. Whatever Rome was (and it was a very hell on earth), the provinces, as we may see in the case of the tumult at Ephesus, when St. Paul was there, were well and effectively administered; the ablest men were chosen to govern them, and appeals received in general, even from a Tiberius, a ready and careful hearing. Apollonius, of Tyana, is said to have got a præfect hanged by him for trying protection, and raising the price of corn. for this period the provinces were the strength of the empire. The men of genius, such as they were, were almost without exception provincial; the provinces recruited the legions, and after Nero's death, as a rule, the successful commander of the troops succeeded to the command of the world. But the poison at the heart spread into an ever-enlarging circle; the margin of health which lay round the confines, sheltering it from the barbarian, grew thinner and thinner, till at last, wearing to a shell, it cracked and broke; and the form of the old world passed away. And now a few words on the story of Cupid and Psyche, of which so much unnecessary stuff has been talked from the time of the Fathers downward, which has been considered alternately an exquisite piece of classic art, a semi-pagan adaptation of Christianity, a sublime allegory, and nobody knows how many things besides; everything, indeed, except what it is, a pretty innocent fairy tale. What high interest it possesses is chiefly historic, as showing the change which had passed over the old mythology; how utterly it had lost its stateliness, and become

degenerate. There is absolutely nothing classic about it, except the names. The old gods and goddesses appear upon the scene, but they are shorn of their glory; and if they were no more to the other minds of the times than they were to Apuleius, it is easy to see that they were near their end. In Cupid and Pysche they are something between the genii of the East, and the fairies of modern Europe. It is certainly very curious to see that both these forms of the supernatural had begun to show themselves at so early an age; but the attempt to combine them with classicism is unsuccessful, and almost offensive. The old flesh and blood reality clings in association to the old names of Venus and of Jupiter, and it is impossible to invest them either with the vague and shadowy grandeur of the genii, or with the young, fresh, romantic beauty of the elves and fairies; consequently not all the power of Apuleius can raise the story into high art. It is very pretty, and that is all. A few ages after it was written, East and West parted. In language, in literature, in government, in religion, each went its own far diverging way, and the elements which appear here united separated finally. The larger or narrative portion of the Golden Ass,' became determinately European; but Cupid and Pysche remained in the East (where, perhaps, in germ, Apuleius had found it), and there it grew up in its own congenial element into the story with which we are all familiar in the Arabian Nights,' of the two sisters who were jealous of their younger sister;' with its black stones on the mountain side, its golden water, its singing tree, and its talking bird. The Arabian version, in our opinion, is more beautiful than that of Apuleius, because it has shaken off the classic inharmonious framework, and the spirit has passed into a body, which suits it better.

But we must again protest strongly against such a pretty story being mistaken for an allegory. Sir George Head seems to think it means the 'soul's pilgrimage,' and that it was borrowed from Christianity. But he has been led astray by the name of Psyche, by the names of the attendants of Venus, and by the allegoric shape of the plot; the poor lady being conducted through Tartarus to an after blessedness. For this shape or shell, if Christianity had been the only speculative system then existing which could have provided him with it, he might have borrowed it from Christianity; but the age was full of such 'soul's pilgrimages.' Allegory, in such a barren time, was the highest living form of art; and every Gnostic and every Platonic system had its own version, more or less beautiful, of the same thing. Doubtless Apuleius had been bored with hundreds of them, when at school at Athens; and being the sort of person to whom such ways of looking at life would be utterly distaste

ful, he took the form which he found, and laid out his art to put a little human beauty into it. If he had intended anything mystical in the theologic sense, he would not have been at such pains to impoverish the dignity of his divinities; and it is likely that in putting the story into the mouth of an old hag in a robber's cave, he was intending a wanton satire on the philosophers in their didactic Cothurnus.

We have a parallel to Cupid and Psyche, of a really mystic kind, in the myth of the Valentinian Sophia, which indeed looks very much like another adaptation of the same substantial legend. Sophia, like Psyche, inspired with Eros, conceives an immortal spirit; but a similar curiosity, similarly fatal, ruins her offspring and ruins herself; and an exile from her home and her love, she wanders mournfully round the gate of the Pleroma.

But as we said, such a sort of working is out of character with Apuleius. Apuleius was a good-humoured, worldly-minded wit; full fed, rosy, and self-indulgent, with as slight a notion of the Infinite as might be; a kind, healthy laugher at the follies of his brother mortals; and as to spirituality with a sort of semiperception of the beautiful, which in happier times might have grown to something, but which, as it was, served only for the ornament or the amusement of his idle hours.

Still less is it necessary to agree with the translator that he hated Christianity, and satirized it in the person of the old baker's wife. The Fathers of the fourth and fifth century may have thought so, but critical ability was not their most distinguishing characteristic, and their criticism does not go for much. The single evidence against him is, that the woman is accused of slighting the Olympian gods, and of worshipping one God, whom she pretended was the only one. But why may she not have been a Jew? a vagabond Jew, of which there were hundreds of thousands scattered up and down the world? far more likely this than a Christian. The latter commonly being considered Atheists, or Tritheists, or man-worshippers, anything but pure Theists.

Or why not a member of any one of those thousand sects of every conceivable profession which swarmed in every city and village? The educated gentlemen of the second century cared too little for Christianity to hate it, or to be nice in their scrutiny of it. Hadrian, on the whole a careful inquirer, in a statistical account of the various existing religions, classes Jews, Christians, and Egyptians, under a common head, as worshippers of Serapis; and Apuleius, if he had cared to cast a thought upon it, would have regarded it with the same indulgent pity with which an educated Englishman regards the obscure sects of fanatics in the far west of America.

But we will not quarrel with the translator on a question of detail; we will leave him rather with hearty thanks for his work, which, from the skill and humour with which it is executed, has evidently been a labour of love. On the whole, we doubt, considering the unfitness of Latin at its best for humorous writing, and how vile Apuleius's Latin is, whether this English version is not truer to the writer's idea than his own. He deserves particular praise, too, for the good sense which he has shown in dealing with the questionable passages. Clumsy_translators omit, but show that they are omitting. Sir George Head covers up the vacancy-we read on and miss nothing. Whatever is really bad he has cleansed utterly out, and the book is all the better for it in every sense. In most of these passages there was no genuine humour, and their merit was their filth. For those readers whose taste lies that way, the Latin version remains as it was. In the English, only a very prurient imagination indeed will find anything to offend.

ART. VII.-1. The Pope in the Nineteenth Century. By Joseph Mazzini. London: C. Gilpin. 1851.

2. Orations. By Father Gavazzi. London: D. Bogue.

1851.

3. Dealings with the Inquisition; or, Papal Rome, her Priests, and her Jesuits, with important Disclosures. By the Rev. Giacinto Achilli, D.D., late Prior and Visitor of the Dominican Order, &c. &c. London: Arthur Hall, Virtue and Co. 1851.

4. The Authority of God; or, the true Barrier against Romish and Infidel Aggression. Four Discourses, by the Rev. J. H. Merle d'Aubigné, D.D. Author's Complete Edition. London: Part1851.

ridge and Oakey.

5. The History of Church Laws in England, from A.D. 602 to A.D. 1850. By Edward Muscutt. London: C. Gilpin. 1851.

6. The Idol Demolished by its own Priest. An Answer to Cardinal Wiseman's Lectures on Transubstantiation. By James Sheridan Knowles. Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black. 1851.

7. Popish Infallibility. Letters to Viscount Fielding, on his Secession from the Church of England. By Charles Hastings Collette. London: Arthur Hall, Virtue and Co. 1850.