treat the orientals like a master and to have asserted that his policy was to treat them as their leader. We know from Aristotle's “ Politics” that with all his learning, the philosopher had not shaken off Hellenic prejudices, and that he regarded the Eastern nations as born for slavery. Apart from the questionable nature of his theory, he can have known little of the great Aryan barons of Bactriana or Sogdiana, who had for centuries looked on the Greek adventurers they met as the Romans did in later days. But Alexander belongs to a different age from Aristotle, as different as Thucydides from Herodotus, contemporary though they were in their lives, and he determined to carry out the “marriage of Europe and Asia." To a Hellene the marriage with a foreigner would seem a more or less disgraceful concubinage. The children of such a marriage could not inherit in any petty Greek state. Now the greatest Mace. donian nobles were allied to Median and Persian princesses, and the Greeks who had attained high official position at court, such as Eumenes, the chief secretary, were only too proud to be admitted to the same privilege.

The fashion of making or cementing alliances by marriages becomes from this time a feature of the age. The kings who are one day engaged in deadly war are the next connected as father and son-in-law, or as brothers-in-law. No solemn peace seems to be made without a marriage, and yet these marriages seldom hinder the breaking out of new wars.

All the Greek historians blame the Persian tendencies of Alexander, his assumption of oriental dress and of foreign ceremonial. There was but one of his officers, Peucestas, who loyally followed his chief, and who was accordingly rewarded by his special favor. Yet if we remember Greek prejudices, and how trivial a fraction of the empire the Greeks were in population, we may fairly give Alexander credit for more judgment than his critics. No doubt the Persian dress was far better suited to the climate than the Macedonian. No doubt he felt that a handful of Macedonians could never hold a vast empire without securing the sympathy of the conquered. At all events he chose to do the thing his own way, and who will say that he should have done it as his critics prescribe?

The relations of the great king to the art of his day need not detain us long. His busy and agitated life did not permit him to be an art patron like the second Ptolemy of Alexandria or the first Attalus of Pergamum. But we know that he appreciated the great service which art could render to the splendor of his royalty, and the story survives that he would allow no sculptor but Lysippus, no painter but Apelles, to represent his semi-divine personality in bronze or on canvas. Whether the famous head at Florence is indeed the copy of Lysippus' work, and represents the conqueror, is not yet certain. But if it does, then, even in his assumed divinity, there are left the traces of human passion, the imperfection of human longing, the divine despair which attaches to the highest mortal natures, because they are high, and because they are mortal.

But both Lysippus and Apelles belonged to the older generation ; we know of no younger artist that he favored except the extravagant Dinocrates, with his colossal imaginings, which seem rather the dreams of a flatterer than the conceptions of an artist; and yet we shall find that there were younger artists in his day, worthy, if any ever were, of his patronage.

THE DYING GLADIATOR.

BY LORD BYRON.

THE seal is set. - Now welcome thou dread power!

Nameless, yet thus omnipotent, which here
Walk'st in the shadow of the midnight hour,

With a deep awe, yet all distinct from fear;
Thy haunts are ever where the dead walls rear

Their ivy mantles, and the solemn scene
Derives from thee a sense so deep and clear,

That we become a part of what has been,
And grow unto the spot, all seeing but unseen.

And here the buzz of eager nations ran

In murmured pity, or loud roared applause,
As man was slaughtered by his feliow-man.

And wherefore slaughtered? wherefore, but because
Such were the bloody circus' genial laws,

And the imperial pleasure. — Wherefore not?
What matters where we fall to fill the maws

Of worms on battle plains or listed spot ?
Both are but theaters where chief actors rot.

I see before me the Gladiator die :

He leans upon his hand - his manly brow
Consents to death, but conquers agony;

And his drooped head sinks gradually low;
And through his side the last drops, ebbing slow

From the red gash, fall heavy, one by one,
Like the first of a thundershower; and now

The arena swims around him — he is gone
Ere ceased the inhuman shout which hailed the wretch wlo

won.

He heard it, but he heeded not — his eyes

Were with his heart, and that was far away;
He recked not of the life he lost, nor prize,

But where his rude hut by the Danube lay -
There were his young barbarians all at play;

There was their Dacian mother — he, their sire,
Butchered to make a Roman holiday:

All this rushed with his blood. Shall he expire,
And unavenged? – Arise! ye Goths, and glut your ire!

THE DEFEAT OF THE GALATIANS."

BY PAUSANIAS.

[PAUSANIAS lived in the reign of the Antonines, and wrote a “ Tour around Greece."']

THE Galati inhabit the remotest parts of Europe, near a mighty sea, not navigable where they live: it has tides and breakers and sea monsters quite unlike those in any other sea : and through their territory flows the river Eridanus, by whose banks people think the daughters of the sun lament the fate of their brother Phaethon. And it is only of late that the name Galati has prevailed among them : for originally they were called Celts both by themselves and by all other nations. And an army gathered together by them marched towards the Ionian Sea, and dispossessed all the nations of Illyria and all that dwelt between them and the Macedonians, and even the Macedonians themselves, and overran Thessaly. And when they From “ Description of Greece." By permission of Geo. Bell & Sons.