IN

the upper story of a house in the Museum-street of Alexandria, built and fitted up on the old Athenian model, was a small room. It had been chosen by its occupant, not merely on account of its quiet; for though it was tolerably out of hearing of the female slaves who worked, and chattered, and quarrelled under the cloisters of the women's court on the south side, yet it was exposed to the rattle of carriages and the voices of passengers in the fashionable street below, and to strange bursts of roaring, squealing, and trumpeting from the Menagerie, a short way off, on the opposite side of the street. The attraction of the situation lay, perhaps, in the view which it commanded over the wall of the Museum gardens, of flower-beds, shrubberies, fountains, statues, walks, and alcoves, which had echoed for nearly seven hundred years to the wisdom of the Alexandrian sages and poets. School after school, they had all walked, and taught and sung there, beneath the spreading planes and chesnuts, figs and palm-trees. The place seemed fragrant with all the riches of Greek thought and song, since the days when Ptolemy Philadelphus walked there with Euclid and Theocritus, Callimachus and Lycophron.

On the left of the garden stretched the lofty eastern front of the Museum itself, with its picture-galleries, halls of statuary, dininghalls, and lecture-rooms; one huge wing containing that famous library, founded by the father of Philadelphus, which held in the time of Seneca, even after the destruction of a great part of it in Caesar's siege, four hundred thousand manu

VOL. XLV. NO. CCLXV.

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scripts. There it towered up, the wonder of the world, its white roof bright against the rainless blue; and beyond it, among the ridges and pediments of noble buildings, a broad glimpse of the bright blue sea.

The room was fitted up in the purest Greek style, not without an affectation of archaist severity in the forms and subdued half-tints of the frescoes which ornamented the walls with scenes from the old myths of Athene. Yet the general effect, even under the blazing sun which poured in through the mosquito nets of the court-yard windows, was one of exquisite coolness, and cleanliness, and repose. The room had neither carpet, nor fire-place, nor shelves; and the only moveables in it were a sofa-bed, a table, and an arm-chair, all of such delicate and graceful forms, as may be seen on ancient vases of a far earlier period than that whereof we write. But, most probably, had any of us entered that room that morning, we should not have been able to spare a look either for the furniture, or the general effect, or the Museum gardens, or the sparkling Mediterranean beyond; but we should have agreed that the room was quite rich enough for human eyes, for the sake of one treasure which it possessed, and, beside which, nothing was worth a moment's glance. For in the light arm-chair, reading a manuscript which lay on the table, sat a woman, of some five-and-twenty years, evidently the tutelary goddess of that little shrine, dressed, in perfect keeping with the archaism of the chamber, in a simple old snow-white Ionic robe, falling to the feet and reaching to the throat, and of that peculiarly severe and

proful thahion in which the upper part of the dress falls downward Bain from the neck to the waist in # out of rape, entirely hiding the outline of the bust, while it leaves the arms and the point of the shouldbare H das was entirely without ornament, except the two How purple stripes down the bout which market her rank as a Roman Hen, the gold sandals on bbt, and the gold not, which Jogol bob from Tur torchond to bock ban who colour and wore bundly distinguishable Toom that of the intal Half, such Adin h It might have envied Je list and mase, and sipple Hop Autorce mine mud fort wie of the pop mod gram at type of old ich beauty # w showing wh die high development the bone, and posing them with that mig round, ripe outline,

vulgar herd, they have not Hypatia.

Ay. To believe in the old cr while every one else is dro away from them.... To believe I spite of disappointments.... Tule against hope.... To show oursit superior to the herd, by seemr boundless depths of living glory 1 myths which have become dark ac dead to them.... To struggle to the last against the new and vulg superstitions of a rotting age, fo the faith of my forefathers, for the old gods, the old heroes, the old sages, who gauged the mysteries of heaven and earth-and perhaps to conquer!-at least to have my reward! To be welcomed into the celestial ranks of the heroic-to rise to the immortal gods, to the ineffable powers, onward, upward ever, through ages and through eternifios, till I find my home at last, and vanish in the glory of the Nameloss and the Absolute One! ...

..

And her whole face flashed out into wild glory, and then sank again suddenly into a shudder of something like fear and disgust, as she saw, watching her from under the wall of the gardens opposite, a crooked, withered Jewish crone, dressed out in the most gorgeous and fantastic style of barbaric thery,

Why does that old hag haunt me I'sco her everywhere-till the last month at least-and here she is again! I will ask the prefect to find out who she is, and get rid of her, before she fascinates me with that oil eye. Thank the gods, there she moves away! Foolish!-foolish of me, a philosopher. I, to believe, against the authority of Porphyry him I, too, in evil eyes and magic! But there is my father, pacing up and down in the library.'

As who spoko, the old man entered from the next room. He was a threek also, but of a more common, mud, perhaps, lower type; dark and fiery, than and graceful; his delicate Spune and checks, wasted by medi tation, harmonized well with the stand and simple philosophic cloak which he wore na n sign of his proTim. He paced impatiently up and down the chamber, while his keen, glittering eyes and restless