TITUS LUCRETIUS. ITUS LUCRETIUS CARUS was born about B. c. 95, at Rome, and educated at Athens. He destroyed himself in his forty-fourth year, and his poem was produced to the world under the auspices and revision of Cicero. His contempt of the pagan polytheism indicates a penetrating understanding and a strong moral sense it was by a natural revulsion of the human mind that he turned from such gods as those of paganism Gods partial, changeful, passionate, unjust, As a didactic poet and reasoner in verse there is no writer, with the exception of Pope, who can be compared with Lucretius. PRIMITIVE MANKIND. FROM THE LATIN OF TITUS LUCRETIUS CARUS. Then hardier, as beseemed, the race of earth, None then to set the tender sapling knew Matured, sufficed them for the passing hour; Midst oaks whose rustling mast bestrewed the ground Nourished they lay, their feasts with acorns crowned. Then wintry arbutes, that allure the sight, With blushing hue of ripened scarlet bright; Earth poured more plenteous and of ampler size, For the new world, in fresh varieties, Blossomed with genial fruits, abundant then To sate the wants of miserable men. Rivers and fountains with their gurgling sound Called them to slake their thirst in crowds around. Nor fire to them its uses had revealed, Since the hard ground had ushered them to Or groves and woodland glens a shelter gave, And close in thickets, till the storm were past, birth; More vast their solid bones, and firm within Were strung the nerves that branched be neath their skin. No change of skies impaired that giant mould, Proof 'gainst the heat and braced to feel the cold; No unknown ailment their frames diseased, No plagues infectious on their bodies seized; While rolling lustres round the heavens had fled, They shunned the pelting shower and beating blast. No common weal the human tribe allied; Bound by no laws, by no fixed morals tied, Each snatched the booty which his fortune brought, And, wise in instinct, each his welfare sought. With wondrous force of feet and hands endued, Wild as the beasts their wandering lives they They the wild race of woodland beasts purled. sued; No swain robust had turned with guiding With missile stones and ponderous clubs. The crooked plough, no iron delved the land; Full many fell deep lairs concealed the rest And when the chase was done, in night's was with him only a sinew of war. He knew dark shade, better how to acquire riches than how to preserve them, and, living on plunder, was always poor. It cost him no more to pardon than to deceive. His conversation was sweet and Like bristly boars beneath the forest laid, round. No cause was left for distrust or amaze which he did not keep, and, whether he were serious or gay, he had always a design at the bottom. His constant maxim was to caress those whom he hated, to instigate quarrels between those who loved him, and separately to flatter each party whom he had And earth be wrapped in one eternal night. fly, Quit to their savage guests the leaf-strewn bed of eloquence, had a ready apprehension and a graceful delivery. He had for his successor his son Alexander, who had greater virtues And face the storm of night with bare un- and greater vices than himself. Both tri umphed over their enemies, although by different means. The one employed open force only; the other had recourse to artifice. The one congratulated himself when he had deceived his enemies; the other, when he had conquered them. Philip had more policy; Alexander, more dignity. The father knew how to dissemble his rage, and sometimes to conquer it; the son in his vengeance knew neither delay nor bounds. Both loved wine too well, but drunkenness, which opens the heart, produced different effects in them. Philip in going from a feast went to seek for danger and exposed himself with temerity; Alexander turned his rage against the associates of his revelry. The one often returned from battle covered with wounds received from his enemies; the other rose from table defiled with the blood of his friends. The father wished to be loved; the son desired only to be feared. Both cultivated letters— the former through policy, the latter through taste. I. VIOLET TEMPEST. LOVE AND WAR. HEY were all back at the Abbey House again early in June, and Vixen breathed more freely in her sweet native air. How dear, how doubly beautiful, everything seemed to her after even so brief an exile! But it was a grief to have missed the apple-bloom and the bluebells. The woods were put ting on their ripe summer beauty; the beeches had lost the first freshness of their tender green; the amber glory of the young oak-leaves was over; the last of the primroses had paled and faded among the spreading bracken; masses of snowy hawthorn bloom gleamed white amidst the woodland shadows: bean-fields in full bloom filled the air with delicate odors; the summer winds swept across the long lush grass in the meadows, beautiful with ever-varying lights and shadows; families of sturdy black piglings were grubbing on the waste turf beside every road, and the forest-fly was getting strong upon the wing. The depths of Mark Ash were dark at noontide under their roof of foliage. Vixen revelled in the summer weather. She was out from morning till evening, on foot or on horseback, sketching or reading in some solitary corner of the woods, with Argus for her companion and guardian. It was an idle, purposeless existence for a young woman to lead, no doubt, but Violet Tempest knew of no better thing that life offered for her to do. Neither her inother nor Captain Carmichael interfered with her liberty. The captain had his own occupations and amusements, and his wife was given up to frivolities which left no room in her mind for anxiety about her only daughter. So long as Violet looked fresh and pretty at the breakfast-table and was nicely dressed in the evening, Mrs. Carmichael thought that all was well, or, at least, as well as it ever could be with a girl who had been so besotted as to refuse a wealthy young nobleman. So Vixen went her own way, and nobody cared. She seemed to have a passion for solitude, and avoided even her old friends the Scobels, who had made themselves odious by their championship of Lord Mallow. The London season was at its height when the Carmichaels went back to Hampshire. The Dovedales were to be at Kensington till the beginning of July, with Mr. Vawdrey in attendance upon them. He had rooms in Ebury street, and had assumed an urban air which in Vixen's opinion made him execrable. "I can't tell you how hateful you look in lavender gloves and a high hat," she said to him one day in Clarges street. "I dare say I look more natural dressed like a gamekeeper," he answered, lightly: 'I was born so. As for the high hat, you can't hate it more than I do; and I have 66 always considered gloves a foolishness on a level with pigtails and hair-powder." Vixen had been wandering in her old haunts for something less than a fortnight, when, on one especially fine morning, she mounted Arion directly after breakfast and started on one of her rambles, with the faithful Bates in attendance to open gates or to pull her out of bogs if needful. Upon this point Mrs. Carmichael was strict. Violet might ride when and where she pleased, since these meanderings in the Forest were so great a pleasure to her, but she must never ride without a groom. On this particular morning Vixen was in a thoughtful mood and Arion was lazy. She let him walk at a leisurely pace under the beeches of Gretnam Wood and through the quiet paths of the New Park plantations. He came slowly out into Queen's Bower, tossing his delicate head and sniffing the summer air. The streamlets were rippling gayly in the noontide sun; far off on the yellow common a solitary angler was whipping the stream-quite an unusual figure in the lonely landscape. A delicious slumberous quiet reigned over all the scene. Vixen was lost in thought, Bates was dreaming, when a horse's hoofs came up stealthily beside Arion, and a manly voice startled the sultry stillness. "I've got rid of the high hat for this year, and I'm my own man again," said the voice; and then a strong brown hand was laid upon Vixen's glove and swallowed up her slender fingers in its warm grasp. "Late last night." "And have the duchess and her people come back to Ashbourne?" "Pas si bête. The duchess and her people-meaning Mabel-have engagements six deep for the next month: breakfasts, lawnparties, music, art, science, horticulture, dancing, archery, every form of laborious amusement that the genius of man has invented. One of our modern sages has said that life would be tolerable but for its amusements; I am of that wise man's opinion. Fashionable festivities are my aversion, so I told Mabel frankly that I found my good spirits being crushed out of me by the weight of too much pleasure, and that I must come home to look after my farm. The dear old duke recognized that duty immediately, and gave me all sorts of messages and admonitions for his bailiff.” I "And you are really free to do what you like for a month?" exclaimed Vixen, naively. "Poor Rorie! how glad you must be !" "My liberty is of even greater extent. am free till the middle of August, when I am to join the Dovedales in Scotland. Later, I suppose, the duke will go to Baden, or to some newly-discovered fountain in the Black Forest. He could not exist for a twelvemonth without German waters." "And after that there will be a wedding, I suppose?" said Violet. She felt as if called upon to say something of this kind. She wanted Rorie to know that she recognized his position as an engaged man. She hated talking about the business, but she felt somehow that this was incumbent upon her. "I suppose so," answered Rorie; "a man must be married once in his life. The sooner he gets the ceremony over, the better. My engagement has hung fire, rather. There is always a kind of flatness about the thing between cousins, I dare say. Neither of us is in a hurry. Mabel has so many ideas and occupations, from orchids to Greek choruses.' "She is very clever," said Vixen. "She is clever and good, and I am very proud of her," answered Rorie, loyally. He felt as if he were walking on the brink of a precipice, and that it needed all his care to steer clear of the edge. After this there was no more said about Lady Mabel. Vixen and Rorie rode on happily side by side, as wholly absorbed in each other as Lancelot and Guinevere when the knight brought the lady home through the smiling land, in the glad boyhood of the year, by tinkling rivulet and shadowy covert and twisted ivy and spreading chestnut fans, and with no more thought of Lady Mabel than those two had of King Arthur. It was the first of many such rides in the fair June weather. Vixen and Rorie were always meeting in that sweet pathless entanglement of oak and beech and holly where the cattle-line of the spreading branches was just high enough to clear Vixen's coquettish little hat, or in the long, straight fir plantations where the light was darkened even at noonday, and where the slumberous stillness was broken only by the hum of summer flies. It was hardly possible, it seemed to Violet, for two people to be always riding in the Forest without meeting each other very often. Various as the paths are, they all cross somewhere; and what more natural than to see Rorie's brown horse trotting calmly along the grass by the wayside at the first bend of the road? They made no appointments, or were not conscious of making any; but they always met. There was a fatality about it; yet neither Rorie nor Violet ever seemed surprised at this persistence of fate. They were always glad to see each other; they had always a world to tell each other. If the earth had been newly made every day, with a new set of beings to people it, those two could hardly have had more to say. "Darned if I can tell what our young miss and Muster Vawdrey can find to talk about," said honest old Bates over his dish of tea in the servants' hall, "but their tongues ha' never done wagging." Sometimes Miss Tempest and Mr. Vawdrey went to the kennels together and idled away an hour with the hounds, while their horses stood at ease with their bridles looped round the five-barred gate, their heads hanging lazily over the topmost bar, and their big soft eyes dreamily contemplating the opposite pine-wood with that large capacity for perfect idleness common to their species. Bates was chewing a straw and swinging his hunting-crop somewhere in attendance. He went with his young mistress everywhere and played the part of the "dragon of prudery placed within call," but he was a very amiable dragon and nobody minded him. Had it come into the minds of Rorie and Vixen to elope, Bates would not have barred their way. Indeed, he would have been very glad to elope with them himself. The restricted license of the Abbey House had no charm for him. Whither were those two drifting in the happy summer weather, lulled by the whisper of forest leaves faintly stirred by the soft |