it an act of discretion to change tranquillity for alarm, or friends for soldiers, or a couch for a throne, or a sound sleep for a broken one. If you doubt whether I love you (and every prince may reasonably entertain that doubt of every man around him), yet you cannot doubt that I am attached to your good fortune, in which I have partaken to my heart's content, and in which I hope to continue a partaker.

Polycrates. May the gods grant it!

Anacreon. Grant it yourself, Polycrates, by following my counsel. Every thing is every man's over which his senses extend. What you can enjoy is yours; what you cannot is not. Of all the islands in the world the most delightful and the most fertile is Samos. Crete and Cyprus are larger ; what then? The little Teios, my own native country, affords more pleasure than any one heart can receive: not a hill in it but contains more beauty and more wine than the most restless and active could enjoy. Teach the Samiots, O Polycrates, to refuse you and each other no delight that is reciprocal and that lasts. Royalty is the farthest of all things from reciprocity, and what delight it gives must be renewed daily, and with difficulty. In the order of Nature, flowers grow on every side of us: why take a ploughshare to uproot them? We may show our strength and dexterity in guiding it for such a purpose, but not our wisdom. Love, in its various forms, according to our age, station, and capacity, is the only object of reasonable and just desire. I prefer that which is the easiest to give and to return you, since you have chosen royalty, have taken the most difficult in both; yet by kindness and courtesy you may conciliate those minds, which, once abased by royalty, never can recover their elasticity and strength, unless in the fires of vengeance. The gods avert it from you, my friend! Do not inure your people to war; but instead of arming and equipping them, soften them more and more by peace and luxury. Let your deceit in the ring be your last; for men will rather be subjugated than deceived, not knowing, or not reflecting, that they must have been deceived before they could be subjugated. Let you and me keep this secret : that of the cook is hardly so safe.

Polycrates. Perfectly, or death would have sealed it; although my cook is you know an excellent one, and would be a greater loss to me than any native of the island. A tolerably good minister of state may be found in any cargo of slaves that lands upon the coast. Interest insures fidelity. As for difficulty, I see none: to handle great bodies requires little delicacy. He would make in a moment a hole through a mud-wall who could never make the eye of a needle; and it is easier to pick up a pompion than a single grain of dust. With you however who have lived among such people, and know them thoroughly, I need not discourse long about them; nor take the trouble to argue how impossible it is to blunder on so wide and smooth a road, where every man is ready with a lamp if it is dark, or with a cart if it is miry. You know that a good cook is the peculiar gift of the gods. He must be a perfect creature from the brain to the palate, from the palate to the finger's end. Pleasure and displeasure, sickness and health, life and death, are consigned to his arbitration. It would be little to add that he alone shares with royalty the privilege of exemption from every punishment but capital for it woud be madness to flog either, and turn it loose.

The story of the ring will be credited as long as I want it; probably all my life, perhaps after. For men are swift to take up a miracle, and slow to drop it; and woe to the impious wretch who would undeceive them! They never will believe that I can be unprosperous, until they see me. put to death: some, even then, would doubt whether it were I, and others whether I were really dead, the day following. As we are in no danger of any such event, let us go and be crowned for the feast, and prove whether the mullet has any other merits than we have yet discovered. Come, Anacreon, you must write an ode to Fortune, not forgetting her favorite.

Anacreon. I dare not, before I have written one to Juno, the patroness of Samos; but, as surely as you are uncrucified, I will do it then. Pardon me, however, if I should happen to praise the beauty of her eyes, for I am used to think more about the goddess who has the loveliest; and,

even if I began with the Furies, I should end in all likelihood with HER.

Polycrates. Follow your own ideas. You cannot fail, however, to descant on the facility with which I acquired my power, and the unanimity by which I retain it, under the guidance and protection of our patroness. I had less trouble in becoming the master of Samos than you will have in singing it. Indeed, when I consider how little I experienced, I wonder that liberty can exist in any country where there is one wise and resolute man.

Anacreon. And I that tyranny can, where there are two. Polycrates. What! Anacreon, are even you at last so undisguisedly my adversary?

Anacreon. Silly creature! behold the fruit of royalty! Rottenness in the pulp, and bitterness in the kernel.

Polycrates, if I had uttered those words before the people, they would have stoned me for being your enemy,- for being a traitor! This is the expression of late, not applied to those who betray but to those who resist or traverse the betrayer. To such a situation are men reduced when they abandon self-rule! I love you from similarity of studies and inclinations, from habit, from gayety of heart, and because I live with you more conveniently than in a meaner house and among coarser slaves. As for the Samiots, you cannot suppose me much interested about them. Beauty itself is the less fierce from servitude; and there is no person, young or old, who does not respect more highly the guest of Polycrates than the poet of Teios. You, my dear friend, who are a usurper-for which courage, prudence, affability, liberality, are necessary - would surely blush to act no better or more humanely, than a hereditary and established king, the disadvantages of whose condition you yourself have stated admirably. Society is not yet trodden down and forked together by you into one and the same rotten mass, with rank weeds covering the top and sucking out its juices. Circe, when she transformed the companions of Ulysses into swine, took no delight in drawing their tusks and ringing their snouts, but left them, by special grace, in quiet and full possession of their new privileges and dignities. The rod of enchantment was the only rod

she used among them, finding a pleasanter music in the choruses of her nymphs than in the grunts and squeals of her subjects.

Polycrates. Now, tell me truly, Anacreon, if you knew of a conspiracy against me, would you reveal it?

Anacreon. I would; both for your sake and for the conspirators. Even were I not your guest and friend, I would dissuade from every similar design.

Polycrates. In some points, however, you appear to have a fellow feeling with the seditious. You differ from them in this you would not take the trouble to kill me, and could not find a convenient hour to run away.

Anacreon. I am too young for death, too old for flight, and too comfortable for either. As for killing you, I find it business enough to kill a kid as a sacrifice to Bacchus. Answer me as frankly as I answered you. If by accident you met a girl carried off by force, would you stop the ravisher?

Polycrates. Certainly, if she were pretty: if not, I would leave the offense to its own punishment.

Anacreon. If the offense had been perpetrated to its uttermost extent, if the girl were silent, and if the brother unarmed should rush upon the perpetrator armed

Polycrates. I would catch him by the sleeve and stop him. Anacreon. I would act so in this business of yours. You have defloured the virgin. Whether the action will bring after it the full chastisement, I know not; nor whether the laws will ever wake upon it, or, waking upon it, whether they will not hold their breath and lie quiet. Weasels, and other animals that consume our corn, are strangled or poisoned, as may happen: usurpers and conquerors must be taken off quietly in one way only, lest many perish in the attempt, and lest it fail. No conspiracy of more than two persons ought ever to be entered into on such a business. Hence the danger is diminished to those concerned, and the satisfaction and glory are increased. Statues can be erected to two, not to many; gibbets can be erected as readily to many as to few; and would be: for most conspiracies have been discovered and punished, while hundreds of usurpers have been removed by their cooks, their

silent at his request; they were rapturous at mine, — one excepted.

Polycrates. And what said he?

Anacreon. "By Bacchus!" he exclaimed, “I thought sycophants were the most impudent people in the world: but, Anacreon, verily thou surpassest them; thou puttest them out of countenance, out of breath, man!"

Your liberality was as usual enough for us; and, if Envy must come in, she must sit between us. Really the dress, coarse as it was, that you gave Placoeis, the associate of Hylactor, would have covered Tityus; nay, would have made winding-sheets, and ample ones, for all the giants, if indeed their mother Earth enwrapped their bone in any. Meditating the present of such another investiture, you must surprise or scale Miletus; for if, in addition to the sheep of Samos, the cows and oxen, the horses and swine, the goats and dogs, were woolly, the fleeces of ten years would be insufficient. As Placoeis moved on there were exclamations

of wonder on all sides, at all distances. "Another Epeüs* must have made that pageant!" was the cry; and many were trodden under foot from wishing to obtain a sight of the rollers. His heat, like the sun's, increased as he proceeded; and those who kept egg stalls and fish stalls cursed him and removed them.

Polycrates. We will feast again no less magnificently when I return from my victory on the continent. There are delicate perfumes and generous wines and beatiful robes at Sardis.

PERICLES AND SOPHOCLES

PERICLES. O Sophocles! is there in the world a city

so beautiful as Athens? Congratulate me, embrace me; the Piræus and the Poecilè are completed this day.† My glory is accomplished; behold it founded on the supremacy of our fellow-citizens !

*Framer of the Trojan Horse.

†Their decorations only; for the structures were finished before. The propylæa of Pericles were entrances to the citadel: other works