her head," and otherwise misbehaving herself, and he would endure it no longer. She had led him a very unquiet life of it, he declares, for some years. He makes poor Rhetoric, indeed, say in her defence in the same Dialogue, and with at least some degree of truth, that she had taken him up when he was young, poor, and unknown, had brought him fame and reputation, and lastly in Gaul had made him a wealthy man. It is possible that the declining reputation in which the science, owing to the abuses introduced by unworthy professors, was beginning to be held throughout Greece, may have been one great reason for his withdrawing from it.

He delivered his last lecture on the subject at Thessalonica, where he would again meet with, or at least hear something of, the members of the Christian Church. Thence he returned to his native town of Samosata, found his father still alive there, and soon removed him and his whole family into Greece. He devoted the rest of his life to the study of philosophy and to his literary work, living in good style at Athens.

Lucian still travelled occasionally, and on one occasion paid a visit to the reputed oracle of the arch-impostor Alexander, at Abonoteichos in Paphlagonia, of which he gives a very graphic account. This man exercised an extraordinary influence over the credulity not only of his own countrymen but of strangers also. Lucian's zeal against such sham pretenders here brought him into some trouble, and went near to cost him his life. Alexander, who had specially invited him to an audience, held out his hand, according to custom, for his visitor to kiss; whereupon Lucian, by way of active protest against an imposture which he had already denounced, bit it so hard as actually to lame him for some time. The Prophet affected to treat the thing as a practical joke, but, when Lucian was leaving the country, gave private orders to the captain and crew of the vessel to fling the malicious unbeliever overboarda fate which he only escaped through the unusual tenderheartedness of the Asiatic captain.

He seems to have become poorer again in his later years, and to have occasionally taken up his old profession. But at last the Emporer Marcus Aurelius offered him an official ap

pointment (something like that of Recorder, or Clerk of the Courts) at Alexandria in Egypt. His chief duties were, as he tells us, to preside over the courts of justice and to keep the records. He thought it necessary to write an "Apology" for accepting this position; for it happened that he had just put forth an essay (which will come under notice hereafter) on the miseries of a state of dependence on great men, and was conscious that his enemies might take occasion to sneer at so stout a champion of independence thus consenting to sell himself for office. He must have felt like Dr. Johnson when he consulted his friends as to the propriety of his accepting the pension offered by Lord Bute, after the bitter definitions of the words "pension" and "pensioner" which he had given in the first edition of his Dictionary. The promotion did not come until, as he says, he "had one foot already in Charon's boat," for he must have been above seventy years old when he received it: but the emoluments were fairly good; he was allowed to perform the office by deputy, so that it did not interfere with his busy literary leisure at Athens, and he lived many years to enjoy it. He is said to have been a hundred years old when he died, but nothing certain is known of the date or manner of his death. It has been conjectured with much probability that in his later years he was troubled with the gout, a disorder to which he more than once makes allusion in his writings, very much in the tone of one who spoke from painful experience; and he has left two humorous mock-tragic dramatic scenes in which Gout is personified as the principal character. The torments of which she is the author to mankind are amusingly exaggerated. Philoctetes is made out to have been a sufferer, not from the bite of the snake or from the poisoned arrow, but simply from gout in his foot-enough to account for any amount of howls and lamentations, such as are put in his mouth by Sophocles; and Ulysses must have died by the same enemy, and not, as was fabled, by the poisonous spine of a sea-urchin.

THE DIALOGUES OF LUCIAN

The best known and the most popular of our author's multifarious writings are his "Dialogues," many of which would form admirable dramatic scenes, containing more of the

spirit of comedy, as we moderns understand it, than either the broad burlesque of Aristophanes or the somewhat sententious and didactic tone of Terence. The "Dialogues of the Gods," in which the old mythological deities are introduced to us as it were in undress, discussing their family affairs and private quarrels in the most familiar style, were composed with a double purpose by their writer. He not only seized upon the absurd points in religious fable as presenting excellent material for burlesque, but he indulged at the same time in the most caustic form of satire upon the popular belief, against which, long before his day, the intellect of even the heathen world had revolted. It is possible that his apprenticeship, brief as it was, to the manufacture of stone Mercuries help to make him an iconoclast. The man who assists in the chiselling out of a god must know more or less that he "has a lie in his right hand." The unhesitating faith in which (apparently) he accepts the truth of all the popular legends about Jupiter and his court, treating them in the most matter-of-fact and earnest way, and assuming their literal truth in every detail, makes the satire all the more pungent. To have sifted the heap of legends into false and true, or to have explained that this was only a poetical illustration, or that an allegorical form of truth, would not have damaged the popular creed half so much as this representation of the Olympian deities under all the personal and domestic circumstances which followed, as necessary corollaries, from their supposed relations to each other. We need not wonder

that the charge of atheism was hurled against him by all the defenders, honest or dishonest, of the national worship. Many as had been the blows struck against it by satirists and philosophers, Lucian's was, if not the hardest, the most deadly of all.

Some of the shorter and more amusing of these “Dialogues of the Gods," as well as of the "Dialogues of the Dead," are here given entire, and are a fair specimen of the humour of the rest.

THE DIALOGUES OF LUCIAN

DIALOGUES OF THE GODS

JUPITER AND CUPID

CUPID. WELL, even if I have done wrong, pray forgive me, Jupiter; I am only a child, you see, and don't know any better.

JUPITER. Child, indeed, Master Cupid! you who are older than Iapetus! Because you don't happen to have grown a beard yet, and because your hair isn't grey, you are to be considered a child, I suppose-old and crafty as you are.

CUP. Why, what great harm have I done you-old as you say I am that you should think of putting me in the stocks?

JUP. Look here, then, you mischievous imp! is this a trifle -the way in which you have disgraced me? There is nothing you have not turned me into-satyr, bull, gold pieces, swan, eagle; but you never yet have made a single woman fall in love with me for myself, nor have I ever been able to make myself agreeable in any quarter in my own person, but I have to use magic in all such affairs, and disguise myself. And after all, it's the bull or the swan they fall in love with; if they see me, they die of terror.

CUP. Yes, no wonder; they are but mortal, you know, Jupiter, and can't endure your awful person.

JUP. How is it, then, that Apollo gets them to fall in love with him?

CUP. Well-Daphne, you know, ran away from him, for all his flowing locks and smooth face. But if you want to make yourself attractive, you mustn't shake your ægis, and carry your thunderbolt about with you, but make yourself look as pleasant as you can,-let your hair hang down on both sides. of your face in curls,-put a fillet round it,—get a purple dress, put on gilded sandals,-walk with the fashionable step, with a pipe and timbrel before you: you'll see, the women will

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run after you then, faster than the Mænads do after Bacchus. JUP. Away with you-I couldn't condescend to be attractive by making myself such a fool as that.

CUP. Very well, Jupiter, then give up love-making altogether; (looking slyly at him)—that's easy enough, you know.

JUP. Nay, I must go on with my courting, but you must find me some less troublesome fashion than that. And upon this sole condition, I let you off once more.

VULCAN AND APOLLO

VULCAN. I say, Apollo-have you seen this young bantling that Maia has just produced? What a fine child it is!-smiles at everybody, and gives plain token already that it will turn out something wonderful-quite a blessing to us all.

APOLLO. A blessing, you think, eh, Vulcan? that childwho is older, in point of wickedness, than old father Iapetus himself!

VUL. Why, what harm can a baby like that do to anybody? AP. Just ask Neptune, he stole his trident. Or ask Mars, the brat slipped his sword out of its sheath as quickly as you please; to say nothing of myself, and he has gone off with my bow and arrows.

VUL. What! that infant? who can hardly stand? the one in the cradle there?

AP. You'll soon find out for yourself, Vulcan, if he pays you a visit.

VUL. Why, he has paid me a visit, just now.

AP. Well, have you got all your tools safe? none of them missing, is there?

VUL. (looking round). No-they are all right, Apollo.
AP. Nay, look carefully.

VUL. By Jove! I can't see my anvil!

AP. You'll find it somewhere in his cradle, I'll be bound. VUL. Why, he's as handy with his fingers as if he had studied thieving before he was born!

AP. Ah! you haven't heard him yet talking, as pert and as glib as may be. Why, he wants to run errands for us all! Yesterday, he challenged Cupid to wrestle with him, and tripped up both his legs in some way, and threw him in a second.