For some years the wrong has been borne in silence: the sufferer knew himself to be powerless as against such an oppressor; and that to show symptoms of impotent hatred was but to call down thunderbolts upon his own bead. Generally, therefore, prudence had guided him. Patience had been the word; silence, and below all the deep, deep word-wait; and if by accident he were a Christian, not only that same word wait would have been heard, but this beside, look under the altars for others that also wait. But poor suffering patience, sense of indignity that is hopeless, must (in order to endure) have saintly resources. Infinite might be the endurance, if sustained only by a finite hope. But the black despairing darkness that revealed a tossing sea selftormented and fighting with chaos, showing neither torch that glimmered in the foreground, nor star that kept alive a promise in the distance, violently refused to be comforted. It is beside an awful aggravation of such afflictions, that the lady herself might have co-operated in the later stages of the tragedy with the purposes of the imperial ruffian. Lamia had been suffered to live, because as a living man he yielded up into the hands of his tormentor his whole capacity of suffering; no part of it escaped the hellish range of his enemy's eye. But this advantage for the torturer had also its weak and doubtful side. Use and monotony might secretly be wearing away the edge of the organs on and through which the corrosion of the inner heart proceeded. On the whole, therefore, putting together the facts of the case, it seems to have been resolved that he should die. But prethis point I acknowledge a difficulty. The criminal was in this case Domitian, the younger son of Vespasian, the tenth Cæsar, younger brother of Titus, the eleventh Cæsar, and himself, under the name of Domitian, the twelfth of the Cæsars, consequently the closing prince in that scries of the initial twelve Cæsars whom Suetonius had undertaken to record. Now the difficulty lies here, which yet I have never seen noticed in any book: was this violence perpetrated before or after Domitian's assumption of the purple? If after, how, then, could the injured husband have received that advice from Titus (as to repairing his loss by a second marriage), which forms part of an anecdote and a bon-mot between Titus and Lamia? Yet again, if not after but before, how was it Lamia had not invoked the protection of Vespasian, or of Titus-the latter of whom enjoyed a theatrically fine reputation for equity and moderation?

viously that he should drink off a final cup of anguish, the bitterest that had yet been offered. The lady herself, again - that wife so known historically, so notorious, yet so total a stranger to man and his generations-had she also suffered in sympathy with her martyred husband? That must have been known to a certainty in the outset of the case, by him that knew too profoundly on what terms of love they had lived. But at length, seeking for crowning torments, it may have been that the dreadful Cæsar might have found the 'raw' in his poor victim, that offered its fellowship in exalting the furnace of misery. The lady herself-may we not suppose her at the last to have given way before the strengthening storm. Possibly to resist indefinitely might have menaced herself with ruin, whilst offering no benefit to her husband. And, again, though killing to the natural interests which accompany such a case, might not the lady herself be worn out, if no otherwise, by the killing nature of the contest? There is besides this dreadful fact, placed ten thousand times on record, that the very goodness of the human heart in such a case ministers fuel to the moral degradation of a female combatant. Any woman, and exactly in proportion to the moral sensibility of her nature, finds it painful to live in the same house with a man not odiously repulsive in manners or in person on terms of eternal hostility. In a community so nobly released as was Rome from all base Oriental bondage of women, this followed-that compliances of a nature oftentimes to belie the native nobility of woman become painfully liable to misinterpretation. Possibly under the blinding delusion of secret promises, unknown, nay, inaccessible, to those outside (all contemporaries being as ridiculously impotent to penetrate within the curtain as all posterity), the wife of Lamia, once so pure, may have been over-persuaded to make such public manifestations of affection for Domitian as had hitherto, upon one motive or another, been loftily withheld. Things, that to a lover carry along with them irreversible ruin, carry with them final desolation of heart, are to the vast current of ordinary men, who regard society exclusively from a political centre, less than nothing. Do they deny the existence of other and nobler agencies in human affairs? Not at all. Readily they confess these agencies: but, as movements obeying laws not

known, or imperfectly known to them, these they ignore. What it was circumstantially that passed, long since has been overtaken and swallowed up by the vast oblivions of time. This only survives namely, that what he said gave signal offence in the highest quarter, and that his death followed. But what was it that he did say? That is precisely the question, and the whole question which we have to answer. At present we know, and we do not know, what it was that he said. We have bequeathed to us by history two words-involving eight letterswhich in their present form, with submission to certain grandees of classic literature, mean exactly nothing. These two words must be regarded as the raw material upon which we have to work: and out of these we are required to turn out a rational saying for Aelius Lamia, under the following five conditions:-First, it must allude to his wife, as one that is lost to him irrecoverably; secondly, it must glance at a gloomy tyrant who bars him from rejoining her; thirdly, it must reply to the compliment which had been paid to the sweetness of his own voice; fourthly, it should in strictness contain some allusion calculated not only to irritate, but even to alarm or threaten his jealous and vigilant enemy; fifthly, doing all these things, it ought also to absorb, as its own main elements, the eight letters contained in the present senseless words- Heu taceo.'

Here is a monstrous quantity of work to throw upon any two words in any possible language. Even Shakspere's clown,* when challenged to furnish a catholic answer applicable to all conceivable occasions, cannot do it in less than nine letters-namely, Oh lord, sir. I, for my part, satisfied that the existing form of Heu taceo was mere indictable and punishable nonsense, but yet that this nonsense must enter as chief element into the stinging sense of Lamia, gazed for I cannot tell how many weeks at these impregnable letters, viewing them

* In 'All's Well that Ends Well.'

sometimes as a fortress that I was called upon to escalade, sometimes as an anagram that I was called upon to re-organise into the life which it had lost through some dislocation of arrangement. Finally the result in which I landed, and which fulfilled all the conditions laid down was this:-Let me premise, however, what at any rate the existing darkness attests, that some disturbance of the text must in some way have arisen; whether from the gnawing of a rat, or the spilling of some obliterating fluid at this point of some critical or unique MS. It is sufficient for us that the vital word has survived. I suppose, therefore, that Lamia had replied to the friend who praised the sweetness of his voice, 'Sweet is it? Ah, would to Heaven it might prove Orpheutic.' Ominous in this case would be the word Orpheutic to the ears of Domitian: for every schoolboy knows that this means a wife-revoking voice. But first let me remark that there is such a legitimate word as Orpheutaceam: and in that case the Latin repartee of Lamia would stand thus - Suavem dixisti? Quam vellem et Orpheutaceam. But, perhaps, reader, you fail to recognise in this form our old friend Heu taceo. But here he is to a certainty, in spite of the rat: and in a different form of letters the compositor will show him up to you asvellem et Orp. [HEU TACEAM]. Possibly, being in good humour, you will be disposed to wink at the seemingly surreptitious AM, though believing the real word to be taceo. Let me say, therefore, that one reading, I believe, gives taceam. Here, then, shines out at once-(1) Eurydice the lovely wife; (2) detained by the gloomy tyrant Pluto; (3) who, however, is forced into surrendering her to her husband, whose voice (the sweetest ever known) drew stocks and stones to follow him, and finally his wife; (4) the word Orpheutic involves an alarming threat, showing that the hope of recovering the lady still survived; (5) we have involved in the restoration all the eight, or perhaps nine, letters of the erroneous form.

spoke of the inconvenience, and also tried to cajole me by lamenting the loss to their children, and to themselves too, which my going would be. I was not taken in by their fair speaking and flatteries, but, as they were not bad people on the whole for Russians, and as it was certainly true that good tutors are not to be picked up every day, so that I could really not be replaced immediately, I agreed to go with them to Paris, and continue my services till they should leave it for Russia. And I did so. I may also remind you that I was desperately poor at the time, and that half-a-year's salary was consequently an important consideration. Besides, I thought that the few months would soon pass away. But I had a dreadful time of it. With other than Russian children, I should think that even if one had to take the whole charge of his pupils, he might to some extent occupy himself with reading or otherwise; but with Russian children it is not so. Not only had I constantly and every moment to watch them so as to keep them out of mischief, but I had even to find the means of amusing them; Russian children cannot even play out of their own head. Thus, even when my pupils went to a children's party, as they frequently did while we were in Paris, I had to go with them, and as the governors and governesses of the other children of course did the same, a nice party we half-dozen ladies and gentlemen made in a drawing-room! I never felt so foolish as I did on such occasions. Then, again, there was a French governess for my pupils' sisters, and this dreadful woman (who by the way was so uneducated that I believe she could do little more than read and write) made love to me. She was a handsome girl, but bouncing and on a large scale, and most uncommonly brazen. Actually, before I had been a fortnight with the Galitzins, she told me, looking me full in the face, that governesses and governors in Russian families frequently married each other, and that their employers very much liked such things. But when she found I was blind to her charms and deaf to her hints, she insinuated all sorts of calumnies against me to the lady, whose ear she had. And it being a Russian ear, and consequently suspicious, all she said was listened to, and had its effect. I found out afterwards would you believe it?-that, amongst other things, she told the Galit zins that she believed I was a spy of the

English Government! One result of this (for the silly Russians thought it very possible) was, that I was relieved from the bore of going with my pupils to visit other Russians, some of their friends being people of note in the political world; and I, of course, not knowing the cause of this exemption, was very well pleased at it. But a spy, of all things in the world!-do I look like a spy?'

'No, indeed, governor,' said I; 'but they probably thought you only the more dangerous because you looked so little like one.'

'Perhaps they did,' returned he; 'it's very like them. They are so given to deceit, that they constantly deceive themselves, and they have so much deceit to guard against from each other, that they frequently create in imagination the plots they fancy they are counterplotting. However, suspicious as they were of me, and although I was no spy, I came to know one or two things which they considered great secrets. At all events I learned to know them in their real character and ways of thinking and acting, for I saw many of them first and last, and these of all varieties. And so far as that goes, I do not regret that I passed some time among them in the way I did. Such people as they are, to be sure! I do not speak of the German Russians; indeed, I have already I think drawn the distinction. These much resemble real Germans in natural character and in general education, in accomplishments and in manners, in their habits of thought and speech, in their whole tone, in short; except that in so far are they Russianised that they seldom have anything like the simplicity and artlessness which so often forms the most charming feature of the true German character. But your Sclavonic Russians are quite of another stamp. They have all the imitative power of savages and of monkeys, and can wonderfully well keep up a show of refinement when they make their appearance in Western Europe; but it is astonishing how superficial all this is, and how completely it is only a mask, and an irksome one, worn for the occasion. It is amazing, though, to see how well they do mask their natural brutality and their ignorance, for to any one who does not watch them narrowly, they will seem amiable and well-informed, so cunningly do they hide their real moral character, and so cleverly do they make the most of a