that he may be adjudged to marry her. The play opens with the arrival of a letter from Demipho to say that he is coming home, at which news Antipho feels like the man in the proverb who has got a wolf by the ears—he can neither hold her nor let her go;' and he leaves his cousin Phædra and Geta to face his angry father. Demipho's indignation is chiefly against Phormio, who rather glories in encounters with his dupes, relying on his impudence and shrewdness to carry him through. 'It is a tough morsel,' he says, but I'll make a shift to bolt it.' Geta wonders how he has managed to escape the meshes of the law, but Phormio tells him,

Because, my friend, no fowler spreads his net
For hawk, or kite, or such-like birds of prey;
'Tis for the innocent flock, who do no harm;
They are fat morsels, full of juice and flavour,
Well worth the catching. Men who've ought to lose,
Such are in danger from the law; for me-

They know I've nothing. Nay, but then, you'll say,
They'll clap you up in jail. Oh! will they? Ah!
They'd have to keep me, and they know my appetite.
No, they're too wise, and not so self-denying,
As to return me so much good for evil.'

Collins.

Demipho engages three lawyers to support him in his interview with the parasite, who professes to be shocked at his dis-avowing the connection merely because his worthy relative Stilpho, the father of Phanium, died poor, and threatens to bring an action against him if he sends the girl away. Turning to his counsellors, Demipho finds that each of them takes a different view of the case, and they leave him more bewildered than before. To add to Geta's trouble, Phædria makes him promise to obtain from his uncle the money required to purchase his music-girl. Chremes, who has a wife of whom he stands in awe, now returns from Lemnos, where he has been looking for a lady he privately married there, under another name, with the intention of making his daughter by her the wife of Antipho He is, consequently, as anxious as his brother to annul his nephew's present engagement, and gladly advances part of the sum for which Phormio declares he is ready to become

N

the husband of the girl. Chremes has learnt that his deserted wife came to Athens with her daughter in search of him, and he unexpectedly discovers, in Phanium's attendant, his own daughter's nurse, who also recognises him as Stilpho; but, in his bewilderment, he fails to identify the one girl with the other, and the point of the plot is the comic earnestness with which-confusing his own predicament with that of his nephew-he asks the nurse, What, has he two wives? He then foolishly joins his brother in attempting to make Phormio disgorge the money they have given him to marry Phanium, which, of course, they no longer desire. He will not, however, forego both wife and dowry, and threatens to tell Chremes' wife the whole story. For this impertinence the slaves are called to carry him off to jail; but she makes her appearance, and he puts his threat into execution. At first she is furious, but, as her rival is dead, and the daughter disposed of, she is content with the hold she has obtained over her husband, and at once invites Phormio to supper.

THE TWO BROTHERS.

THESE are Micio and Demea, the first a gay bachelor, but the other has two sons-schinus, who has been adopted by his uncle, and educated in Athens, and Ctesipho, who lives with his father in the country. Demea has brought him up very strictly, and has often protested against his brother's easy ways with Eschinus, who has just carried off a young girl from a slave-dealer's house. But it is Ctesipho who is in love with her, and Æschinus has merely taken the blame to screen him. Syrus, an intriguing slave, persuades Demea that Ctesipho is quietly at home farming, when he is really with his lady-love in his uncle's house. Eschinus, however, is in another scrape on his own account, having an unacknowledged wife and baby; and now his mother-inlaw suspects that he intends to repudiate them, instead of obtaining his uncle's sanction to the marriage, as he has promised to do. By the advice of Geta, a faithful old servant, Hegio, a friend of the family, is induced to repre

sent the case to Micio; and, meeting Demea, he makes him acquainted with this other deliquency on the part of his son. He then hears that Ctesipho is not at the farm, and, on inquiry at Micio's house, he is gravely informed by Syrus that the good youth has been there rating his brother, beating the girl, and breaking the head of the poor slave who nursed him, which Demea tells him serves him right, for having nursed his brother in wickedness. On asking for Micio, he is directed to a shop in an out-of-the-way locality, whither Syrus declares he is gone. Having heard Hegio's story, however, he has really been to ascertain what sort of people his nephew has connected himself with, and, meeting Æschinus in great distress at having been refused admittance to his wife, he eases his mind by telling him he may bring her home as soon as he pleases. Demea comes back, hot and angry from his fruitless walk, and upbraids Micio with his precious ward's still more serious escapade, to which he replies, with irritating composure,—

'Look ye brother,

Man's life is as it were a game of tables;
If that the throw we want will not turn up,
Skill must correct such luck as fortune gives us.'

Demea next encounters another example of his brother's lax discipline in Syrus, who reels against him drunk; and, whilst he is lecturing him, Dromio, another slave, runs out from the house, shouting, 'Ho! Syrus, Ctesipho wants ye,' and, to the father's utter amazement, he thus learns how he has been deceived by his model son. Micio soothes him, however, by promising a dowry to Ctesipho's wife also ; and, overcome by the irony of events, Demea shakes hands with Geta, obtains Syrus his freedom, and Hegio the gift of a farm, and, finally, persuades the old bachelor to marry his ward's mother-in-law.

CATULLUS.

DIED B.C. 53.

ATULLUS was a native of Verona, and had a villa on the shore of Lago di Garda; but he spent nearly all his life in Rome, where, he writes to a friend,

'Alone I live, alone my studies ply,

And there my treasures are, my haunts, my home.'

He appears to have possessed a taste for Greek literature, and to have gathered ideas for his poetical effusions by joining the suite of the prætor Memmius in Bithynia, and afterwards making a yachting tour among the islands of the Archipelago. On returning to Rome he formed a circle of literary acquaintances, and acquired the reputation of being a poet of deep feeling and refined genius, until his death at the early age of thirty-four.

His most celebrated poems are those to Lesbia, a sister of the notorious Clodius, for whom he seems to have entertained a most devoted affection, expressed in verses the beauty of which modern lyrists have endeavoured in vain to imitate. The following lines, in the style of Sappho, are an instance of how true to nature were his conceptions :

'For ever when thy face I view,
My voice is to its task untrue,

My tongue is paralysed, and through
Each limb a subtle flame
Runs swiftly; murmurs dim arise
Within my ears, across my eyes
A sudden darkness spreads, and sighs
And tremors shake my frame.'

Martin.

An elegy on the death of his mistress's pet sparrow is, also, equally graceful and pathetic.

Then he compares her with a contemporary beauty, who,

'The simple charms of form and face
I grant that she can show ;
But all the concentrated grace
Of "beautiful," oh no!

For nowhere in her can you find

That subtle, voiceless art,

That something which delights the mind,
And satisfies the heart;

But Lesbia's beautiful I swear,

And for herself she stole

The charms most rare of every fair,

To frame a perfect whole.'

Martin.

But this admiration was soon combined with reproaches for her inconstancy; and, at last, he takes leave of her as a heartless flirt,—

"Giving not that love a thought, which I

So nursed for thee in days gone by,

Now by thy guile slain in an hour,
Even as some little wilding flower,

That on the meadow's border blushed,
Is by the passing plough-share crushed.'

Martin.

Amongst the verses descriptive of his visit to Bithynia, the following stanza expresses many a traveller's impatience for further change :

Already through each nerve a flutter runs

Of eager hope, that longs to be away;

Already 'neath the light of other suns,

My feet, new-winged for travel, yearn to stray;"

and his farewell to the yacht which brought him safe home