he says, would it have been to see the persons themselves; but amidst chat about the pretty gardens, and his yearning to see his little ones, a lurid light flashes across the page, and we have before us again for a moment, the Philip we know of old. "Yesterday," he says (2nd April, 1582), "my nephew and I went to the Auto, and we saw and heard everything very well from a window. They gave us papers with the names of all those whom they brought out. I send you mine that you may see who they were. First, there was a sermon, as usual, and we stayed until the sentences were ended, and then went away, because in the house where we were the secular authorities had to sentence to be burnt those whom the Inquisition had handed over to them. We went at eight and got back to dinner at nearly one. God keep all in safety as I desire!"

It is easy to see that his greatest solace and pleasure were the gardens. Every feature of them in the successive seasons is dwelt upon. On one occasion, his daughters sent him some peaches from their own little garden, but they arrived in such a condition as to be unrecognizable. "I was sc sorry," he says, "I could not taste them, for I am sure I should have liked them, as they come from the little garden under your window." Then he sends him an extra-big sweet lime, which has been given him (but which he believes is a lemon), and some roses and orange-blossom, "that they may see that there are such things there, for the Calabrian (his gardener) brings me nosegays of them every day, and sometimes bunches of violets. I don't think there are any jonquils, or they would have come into bloom already." Jonquils seem to have been but recently introduced, as he tells the girls that the yellow jonquils they received from Aranjuez must be the wild variety which comes earlier than the garden sort, but does not smell so sweetly; "but I expect there will be plenty of all sorts in good time for my sister to see. I don't think she has seen any, as there were none when she left Spain."

There are constant loving messages for, and anxious inquiries about, the heir, Diego. Rosaries, pictures, books, toys, letters to fill in with paint, and other trifles, are sent to the little prince; and when the empress came she brought with her his portrait, with a childish letter and the picture of a horse he had painted, which the proud father thought better than before, and promises him lots of pretty pictures as a reward.

As the end of the year 1582 approached, Portugal now being completely quelled by Alva's iron rule, Philip prepared to return home. Lisbon and the ships from the Indies were scoured for presents for the children. Case after case of curious trifles was sent off to Madrid, and still, writes the king (25th October), "I am seeking other things to bring with me, but they are hard to find." But soon his joyous anticipations of re-union with the young people were dashed with anxiety. The whole family fell ill of small-pox. Granvelle wrote at first that Diego had it very mildly, but soon he and the baby Maria died. Little four-year-old Philip was, says Granvelle, improved by the fell disease; and the two elder girls, Philip thanks God, are but slightly marked. The blow was a crushing one for the bereaved king, but, as he writes to Granvelle, "If it be God's will to afflict him with so many troubles, one over the other, he must bear them without repining." So grief-stricken he came home to his remaining children, and his ceaseless treadmill-toil at his papers which was only to end with his life.

The elder of the two daughters, to whom these letters were written, was that famous Infanta Isabel who was to have been queen of England if the Armada had succeeded; and who, with her husband, the Archduke Albert, was subsequently sovereign of the Netherlands. A loving faithful daughter to the end, she closed her father's eyes in that poor cell in the Escorial, where he breathed his last; and from the time of her imperious youthful beauty, as Anthony More represents her

in her portrait at Hampton Court, to the time when Vandyk painted her as a hard-faced, heavy-jawed old nun, her father and her father's memory were all in all to her. Catharine, the younger daughter, who kept these letters so carefully, married her cousin, Charles Emmanuel of Savoy, in 1585; and by the marriage of her granddaughter into the house of Bourbon, became the ancestress of the present royal family of Spain.

Truly the human heart is a hard book decipher. The man who could gaze upon human creatures undergoing the tortures of the damned by his orders because they differed from him, has been handed down to eternal infamy-and perhaps rightly so on the strength of his public acts. It is unreasonable to ask that his tyranny and cruelty should be forgotten, because there was a soft spot even in his stony heart for those who were nearest him, that the sickening fumes of scorching human flesh should be overpowered by the scent of flowers which Philip loved, or that the shreiks of the myriad martyrs should be drowned by the song of his nightingales; but at least, the facts I have adduced, prove that he was a human creature and not a fiend, and go to support my contention that he was conscientiously and devoutly convinced that he was acting for the best, in ruthlessly crushing those whom he looked upon as the enemies of God and Society.

MARTIN A. S. HUME.

From Good Words.

VIRGIL AS A MAGICIAN. The doubtful honor of being considered a mighty magician, which in the Middle Ages so often fell to the lot of men of superior gifts, was shared by Virgil in a remarkable degree. Why the great poet was thus distinguished, we may discover in the circumstances of his life and his special genius.

In the wide, flat pasture lands of the Mantuan plain, watered by the Mincio, and enriched by the damp fogs arising

from its chain of lakes—in that plain, so often in our own day the scene of Italy's struggles to drive back her Austrian oppressors-there stood, two thousand years ago, near the village of Andes, the homestead of the father of Virgil. Here, with the help of his wife, Maia, he cultivated his little patrimony, and here their son, Publius Virgilius Maro, was born, October 15, B.C. 70. They had sufficient wealth and good sense to bestow on their gifted child a liberal education, sending him to the schools of Milan and Cremona, and afterwards to Naples, where he studied the Greek language and literature. Probably to this early acquaintance with the city of "sweet Parthenope," to use his own expression, we may trace his enduring love for her enchanting shores. His poetic soul must have glowed responsive to her luxuriant loveliness, and her milder air and soft sea-breezes probably suited his health better than the rougher blasts of his Mantuan home. For all his life he was never robust, and we do not read of his ever having taken part in the stirring military events of his time.

The battle of Philippi, B.C. 42, while it made Octavian master of the Roman world, left him in great difficulties as to the payment of his victorious veterans. To meet their demands, he gave them grants of land, chiefly in northern Italy, and in this way the Virgilian patrimony passed into other hands.

About this time there appeared before Augustus a tall, slender young man, . stooping in gait and slow of speech, whose complexion, browned by exposure to the summer sun, and whose rural air placed him in strong contrast with the gilded youth of the luxurious Rome of that day, but in whose eyes was glowing the fire of genius. This was the unknown poet, who was to sing of "Arms and the Man" to his own and future generations. He had come to appeal on his father's behalf for the restitution of the little Mantuan farm, and in this it is probable he succeeded with the emperor, to whom he afterwards testified his gratitude in his first Eclogue, where he addresses him under

of the new faith by the prediction of the near approach of the Golden Age inaugurated by the coming of a Divine Child, words so strangely in accordance with those of the prophet Isaiah (Isaiah ix. 6, 7). Nor can we be surprised that they regarded the writer with a sympathetic feeling, and doubted, pagan though he was, whether the gates of heaven were closed upon him. When St. Paul, on his way to Rome, landed at Pozzuoli (Acts xxviii. 13), then Puteoli, a busy commercial city, he spent seven days there. We may naturally suppose that he looked southwards across the shining bay to the headland of Posilippo, and a beautiful tradition says that, remembering the great poet who there had lived and sung, the Apostle of the Gentiles lamented that he had not been privileged to tell the story of the Saviour of the world to the man who in ignorance had predicted his glorious advent. Another version is, that St. Paul even visited the tomb on the steep hillside, and there wept over the fate of this gifted spirit. So late as the fifteenth century, at Mantua, when the mass of St. Paul's Day was celebrated, a hymn was sung which recorded the story in the following lines:

Ad Maronis mausoleum
Ductus, fudit super eum
Piæ rorem lacrimæ.

Quem te, iniquit, reddidissem
Si te vivum invenissem
Poetarum maxime!

In the mystery plays of the Middle Ages, Virgil was often represented with the Sibyls, who; yet in the night of paganism. had announced the coming of the dawn.

In the Divina Commedia," Dante gives utterance to the prevailing feeling of sorrow that such a soul should, through not having been baptized, be cut off from the joys of Paradise. Dante was sorely troubled for his "beloved master," his "sweetest father," as he calls his guide through the regions of eternal woe and purifying fire, who, alas! was forever relegated to a "pale realm of shade," the limbo of the unbaptized. As readers of the marvellous

poem will remember, this is put in the mouth of the poet Statius, suffering in Purgatory for the denial in his lifetime of his faith in Christianity. Addressing Virgil, he says: "Thou wert the first to send me to Parnassus to drink from her springs, and then thou lightedst my path to God. When thou saidst, 'The age will be renewed, justice and the earlier days of humanity will return, and a new race will descend from heaven,' thou wert like one who walks by night, carrying a lamp whose light avails not to himself, but to those who follow after him. Through thee I be came a poet, through thee I became a Christian" (Purg. xxii. 64-73).

This feeling lingered long in the minds of men, ultimately resolving itself into the belief that Virgil, though debarred from the blessings of Christianity, was gifted with magic powers, which he used for the good of mankind. At first skill in the black art is not attributed to him, but only power arising from his intimate knowledge of the most recondite secrets of nature. He figures especially as the great benefactor of Naples, where by degrees he came to be regarded by the more ignorant of the population as a maker of talismans and charms. In and around Naples we feel ourselves truly in the Virgil country, not only because of the proximity of many places named in the Aneid, but also from local names and traditions. The fisherman still points out "The Rocks of Virgil," and the oldest of the tunnels by which the hill of Posilippo is pierced, is called up to the present day the Grotto of Virgil. For many centuries this was the only direct way of communication between Naples and the Phlegræan Fields. It is said that Virgil, seeing what a boon it would be to the country people, who had to bring the produce of their farms to the city either by boat or by a toilsome journey over the hill, made the tunnel by enchantment in one night. Our own Marlowe thus refers to this in his "Doctor Faustus" (Act iii., scene 1):

There saw we learned Maro's golden

tomb;

The Way he cut an english mile in length Thoroug a rock of stone in one night's space.

That this was the popular belief is shown by the fact of King Robert of Sicily having brought Petrarch here, when his guest in Naples, to ask his opinion on the subject. Petrarch tells us that he thus replied to the king: "I know well that Virgil was a poet and not a magician; besides, I see here the marks of the iron tool used in the excavation." Whoever he may have been who planned "this very dark and most obscure passage, fearful to him who entered it," as an old writer says, did a merciful work, saving many a weary step to men and horses.

In one of the public squares of Naples there stood, five hundred years ago, a colossal bronze horse, probably Greek, but said to be the magic work of the poet, and endowed by him with curative powers for all equine maladies. So great was its fame and reputed success that the farriers, who were losing their trade, bored a hole in its body, and thus deprived it of its magic power. But it was still regarded with such superstitious veneration that the Archbishop of Naples in 1322 had it taken down, and the body melted into a bell for the cathedral. The head was saved, and since 1809 it has been in the Museum of Naples, where the visitor may still see it in the gallery of the bronzes, a masterly piece of sculpture, instinct with fiery life. The rings in the mouth were put there by the Emperor Conrad, about 1251, to hold a bridle, as symbolical of the bridle with which he threatened the Neapolitans. The forelock is tied up in a knot on the forehead, and it is curious to observe how this style of decoration still prevails in Naples, where the best kept cab-horses have this knot of hair tied with bright-colored ribbon.

In pity to the mosquito-tormented Neapolitans. Virgil is reputed to have made a great fly of metal which had the power of driving away all insect plagues.

In connection with the Porta Nolana,

one of the old gates of Naples, a Virgilian tradition long lingered. Gervais of Tilbury, an Englishman, who published a book of travels in 1212, thus relates it. He says: "We call those things wonderful which, although natural, are beyond our understanding; our inability to explain them alone makes them marvellous." He goes on to tell some of the many magic deeds attributed to Virgil by popular report, and then gives his own experience, which he declares must have been incredible to him had it not fallen under his own observation. He was at Salerno, he says, in 1190, when Philip, son of the Earl of Salisbury, unexpectedly landed there on his way to the siege of Acre. Gervais decided to accompany him, and the two went to Naples to seek a ship to take them to Palestine without delay and with as little expense as possible. Arrived in the city, they went to the house of the Archdeacon Giovanni Pignatelli, who received them hospitably, and, while dinner was being prepared, went with them down to the sea. They had no trouble in obtaining what they desired; a vessel was found whose captain was willing to hasten his departure, and to take them for the sum they named. On their expressing to the archdeacon their surprise at their easy success, he asked:— "By which gate did you enter the city?"

They answered, "By the Porta Nolana."

"And at which side of the gate did you come in?"

"As we approached the gate. we were nearest the left side, but an ass laden with wood coming up we were obliged to take the right."

The archdeacon replied, "In order that you may see what wonders Virgil has wrought for our city, I ask you to come with me that I may show you a record of him."

They accordingly all went to the Porta Nolana, and there, on the right side of the gate, the archdeacon pointed out a head in marble which bore an expression of hilarity, while on the left was another head which seemed to