the denial, though he was staggered by the universality of the rumor, and from feeling that those who started the difficulty would not appreciate so simple a solution. Adopting therefore the popular version, he contrasted him with David. Born in the higher ranks, highly educated and of great eloquence, he never with all his arts succeeded in obtaining any judicial office in the republic. And yet his actions showed that he was not insensible to ambition. He did his He did his best, and his failure was due to want of power, not of will. David, on the contrary, not by magic, but by pleasing God, rose from a shepherd to a king. Without much astuteness, the heathen opponent might have replied that Apuleius was not really ambitious. He retired early in life from Rome to his native place Madaura, and there reached the highest judicial post a colony had to offer. He speaks with pride of succeeding to his father's office, and it is a fair conclusion that his ambition looked no higher. Be this as it may, the answer seems to have proved good as an argumentum ad homines, for we hear no more of the question. questionably," from the beginning to the end of the "adventures of his hero Lucius, it was himself whom he intended to personate;" while nearly all modern scholars of authority take a different view. This last is our opinion. If we except, perhaps, the scene describing the initiation, they have apparently no more in common than any other novelist of manners and his hero; though much that the hero relates must most probably consist of the experience of the novelist. Apuleius hated magic, because it had exercised a real and unpleasant influence upon his life. While studying at Athens, he became intimate with a young man, Pontianus, an African like himself. Pontianus's mother, Pudentilla, was a rich lady of forty, who had remained in widowhood thirteen years, for the sake of her sons. That reason no longer applied; and now her own inclination prompted, her family advised, and her physicians prescribed, matrimony. Pontianus fixed upon Apuleius as worthy of being his mother's husband and his own stepfather; and he proceeded in the matter like an adept in But we should wrong Augustin were we match-making. Apuleius happened to be to suppose his "strong, capacious, and visiting at Ea, the modern Tripoli, where argumentative mind" could rest satisfied Pudentilla lived, on his way to Alexandria. with this solution. In his work "On the Pontianus sounded him on the subject of City of God," he has attempted to account marriage, and seing his unwillingness, enfor the phenomenon consistently with phi- treated him not to risk his health by travellosophy and religion. If true, it must be ling that winter, but to wait till next year, attributed to the agency of demons, beings when he would himself accompany him,— to whom the power of creation, or of effect- begging him meanwhile to remain in their ing real transformations, is denied by God, house, which was healthy, and commanded and the power of producing deceptive ap- a view of the sea. a view of the sea. Apuleius acquiesced, and pearances alone conceded. Through some common studies cemented his friendship with inexplicable exercise of that power, the the lady. The favorable moment at length phantasy of one man, that part of us which, arrived; when after the delivery by Apuleius though itself incorporeal, assumes with of a very successful public lecture, Pontianus strange rapidity in thought, or sleep, a told him that the whole of Ea agreed he thousand corporeal shapes, is made to appear would make an excellent husband for Pudento another in the form of an animai; in such tilla. She was, he admitted, a widow witha manner that, while the one, far removed out personal attractions; adding, with a and buried in deep sleep, imagines himself an shrewd knowledge of his friend's weaknesses, animal carrying a load, the other sees, not a that to reserve himself in hope of a match real animal, but the appearance of an animal, for beauty or money, was unbecoming a carrying a load, which, if real, is carried by friend and a philosopher. His wish to travel the unseen demon. Our first impulse is to was the difficulty; but soon he became as laugh, but Augustin had to explain the evi- eager to win the lady as if he had made the dence of persons who testified to having offer. Now her connections began to object. heard of, and actually seen, such tansforma- Pontianus was gained over to their faction, tions. The controversy has left no trace, and every obstacle was placed in the way of except that of compelling each succeeding the lovers,-of course without success. The editor to examine the proof of identity be- opposition, nevertheless, did not cease even tween Apuleius and his hero. The earlier upon the marriage. They prosecuted him in commentators are nearly equally divided on the Court of the Proconsul for dealing in the subject. Sir George Head says, "Un-magic, and so obtaining the lady's affections. Every topic, however irrelevant and absurd, which could make him ludicrous or unpopular, was foisted in to eke out the ridiculous charge; and it is to his Apology that we owe our knowledge of his personal history. He was handsome;-so had other philosophers been, but literary labor had worn away his good looks, and his neglected locks hung down in ropes: he used tooth-powder,-the habit was cleanly and not unphilosophical: he wrote love-sonnets,-his verses might be wanton, but his life was pure: he carried a looking glass,—he was studying the laws of reflection: he was poor,-he had spent his patrimony in assisting his friends and in travelling he collected fishes for the purposes of magic,—he was investigating their natural history, and trying to use them in medicine: a boy had suddenly fallen in his presence, the boy had a fit: a lady of sixty had been charmed into marrying a man half her age, he told the story, the lady was only forty; her relations had got up the prosecution from jealousy at his obtaining her property, and meanwhile he had induced the reluctant Pudentilla to leave her money to her son. The defence was complete; we need not add, he was acquitted. Critics have perplexed themselves to find a hidden meaning in the book. They have supposed it an allegory, representing the soul invited by Virtue and Vice;-like the old story of the Choice of Hercules. Thus Byrrhæna is Virtue, warning Lucius against Pamphile and Fotis, the impersonation of Vice; but led astray by curiosity and love of pleasure, he neglects the warning, and his transformation typifies his fall into sensuality. In the end his better nature,-the human reason beneath the asinine form,―roused and strengthened by misfortune, becomes victorious, and induces him to pledge himself to Virtue by initiation among the worshippers of Isis. Warburton has lent his support to this theory. His ingenuity has tempted him to carry it a step further. He exalts Apuleius into a controversialist, and an inveterate enemy of Christianity; and he considers the true design of the story to be "to recommend Initiation into the Mysteries, in opposition to the New Religion." This interpretation is founded on the character of the baker's wife, and a passage in the Apology, from which Warburton concludes that his accuser was a Christian. For the honor of the African Church, we hope the conclusion is false; and assuredly, if Apuleius had intended to single out Christianity for his attack, he would have made his meaning clearer. Nor do we think the tale an allegory. It was not new; we have it in Lucian, and both are said to have copied from an earlier writer-Lucius of Patræ. But Apuleius introduced two remarkable additions,-the account of the Mysteries, and an allegory, closely connected with them, representing the fall, the trials, and the ultimate restoration of the soul to the love of what is divine, the legend of Cupid and Psyche. In the Greek account Lucius regains his human form on merely tasting roseleaves; Apuleius, by his version, obviously intended to use the old story as a vehicle for a panegyric on the "Mysteries." The advantage of initiation was an established tenet of the philosophy of the day, and in his Apology he boasts of having studied "many sacred systems, rites, and ceremonies, in the pursuit of truth and the exercise of piety." Now, by the side of the true mysteries had grown up a race of impostors, who brought discredit upon them by their debauchery, magic, and lying divinations. To this race belonged the priests of the Syrian goddess, with their bloody rites. To this the Jewish fortune-teller, who appears in Juvenal, between the howling priests of Osiris and the Armenian soothsayer. To this, in common apprehension, the Christian. Like the heathen mysteries, the Christian society was proselyting and migratory. Still more, like them, it was part of the dregs which the Syrian Orontes rolled into the Tiber. No more was needed to arouse prejudice, and render inquiry unnecessary, on the part of a Roman. Every fact and every report was made to harmonize with this theory of its character, and hence come the features in the baker's wife which we can recognize, combined with others to which we know of no counterpart. Against all these superstitions Apuleius levelled his satire. They were gloomy and infernal; nay, more, they were caricatures of the truth. His object was to bring out the contrast. The best commentary on the book is his own confession of faith made on his trial:—“We, of the Platonic school, believe in nothing but what is joyous, cheerful, festive, from above, heavenly." One word upon his Latinity. Grammarians place him with Tertullian and Cyprian, in the African school, the chief peculiarity of which is an affectation of the old forms of speech. Punic was the common language of the north of Africa, and Apuleius learnt his Latin in the schools of the rhetoric ans. The rhetoricians were indebted for the important position they then occupied to the patronage of Hadrian; and, in return, they echoed his imperial criticism, that Cato ranked above Cicero, Ennius above Virgil. Apuleius caught their spirit, and in every page we have the florid declamation of a later age studded with archaisms and expressions which, even when new, are stamped to resemble an early coinage. He is not one of those authors who live by their style. As a novelist he has had his day; but to the student of the history of literature and society during the decay of the Roman Empire, he will always be a useful and amusing companion. From the Dublin University Magazine. GLASGOW IN 1851. I HAD visited Glasgow about twenty years, ago, and vividly remembered its noble Trongate-street, one of the loftiest and most picturesque street-pieces in Europe. I had also a recollection of several handsome ranges of modern cut stone buildings in the district lying west and north of the older parts of the city. A crowded wharf, a stately, bridge, and considerable quantities of smoke issuing from many funnels and chimneys, completed the picture as memory had preserved it. On revisiting Glasgow this summer, it was with some difficulty I could believe it the same city. To reach the Trongate from the western suburbs, I had to go for a distance of two miles and upwards through a west end as handsome as most parts of the new town of Edinburgh, all of cut stone, all regularly laid out in terraces, circuses, crescents, squares, and long street perspectives; to pass by club-houses, banks, and public institutians, all built sumptuously; and to admire hand, especially at the intersections of these fine lines of building, a series of rival churches of the Establishment and of the Free Kirk lifting their emulous porticos and spires in every variety of architectural pretension. But alas! in proportion to the growth of this great new city has been the mcrease in the number of funnels and chimneys, and in their dense overcasting volumes of smoke, so that already the fine-dressed stones of the circuses and terraces, that only a year ago received their first occupants, are turned to a grimy gray; and wherever you raise your eyes past the richly-carved cornices and balustraded parapets which top the buildings on either hand, you perceive over on every head an impending soot-storm driven in murky whirls across the field of vision. The city is girdled with a belt of factories, and crowned, if the figure may be excused, with a chaplet of chimney-stalks. In the middle of the culminating group springs up the great St. Rollox chimney, a hollow brick pillar, forty feet in diameter at the base, and 450 feet high. You might imagine it the Genius of manufacturing Industry that keeps perpetually streaming forth the black, voluminous pennon from its summit, as from a mighty flag-staff. Night and day without intermission the St. Rollox stalk keeps some hundreds of bushels of soot continually suspended in dusky vortices over the heads of the citizens of Glasgow. About fifty minor vomitories surround it, and some 500 others of various sizes prolong the line of circumfumation on either side quite round the city to the river bank. Though the space enclosed is ample, no part of it is half a mile from some portion of the marginal cloud; and save through one segment, comprising about an eighth part of the circle on the north and west, the line of surrounding chimneys is almost continuous. Strange, that so much wealth should have been expended in creating a city so sumptuous in the midst of adjuncts so unpleasing. There are abundance of sites on the opposite side of the river, not much farther from the Exchange, and comparatively free from the neighborhood of factories; but a few cottage villas are as yet the only residences that have sprung up in that quarter, while year after year, almost month after month, the city stretches out the long white lines of its new streets among the smutted hedge-rows and lugubrious groves of the northern river bank. Here was once as pretty a rural outlet as need be desired. The clear, full Kelvin running over its red ledges of sandstone, between green meadows and steep wooded banks, justified, in all but the height of its little cascade, the charming picture drawn by Tannahill: "Let us haste to Kelvin Grove, Through its mazes let us rove, Where the glen resounds the call texture along this bank of Clyde. An acre of land here must be ill-circumstanced not to be worth five thousand pounds. Cast your eye along the river-side what a strepituswhat a fremitus of industry! what a series of works! Here they are making yarns and cloths, there looms and spinning mules; here the hulls of iron-ships, there the steam-engines to propel them; here they are loading, there unloading the finished vessels-ferret opus; in the hot pursuit of wealth every man looks straight before him. The materials are their own. They dig the coal and iron out of their own soil. One of these great steamships, launched on the Clyde and ready for sea, value fifty thousand pounds, has not five thousand pounds worth of foreign material, including the imported bread The Kelvin now for nearly a mile from its of the workmen, in her cost of production. junction with the Clyde is no better than a It is a calling up and creation of so much running sink; and even though its sloppy new wealth out of the land of Lanarkshire, mill-weirs and little clogged rapids made as and the minds and muscles of the artisans of much noise as the fall of Foyers, they would the ship-yard. Little wonder that there are hardly be heard amid the outrageous clatter new streets of fine houses on the river banks, and whizz of the ship-yards, iron works, and where new fleets of fine ships are yearly spinning factories which lie around its em- launched on the river's bosom. Here, too, bouchure. Above the fine archway, how the artisans have their streets of fine houses ever, which carries the great western road as well as the owners and contractors; built over Kelvin Glen, the place retains as many of the same cut stone, only not so smoothly of its original charms as muddied waters and chiselled; with the same airy windows, only the breathings of the smutty south will per- not of plate-glass; and the same lofty and mit; for, with the wind in any other quarter, regular façades, only divided into flats interthis region enjoys a comparatively pure at-nally, and having a common stair of stone, mosphere; and with its still verdant though dark-complexioned groves, and ivied terraces, contrasts refreshingly with the scene nearer the Clyde. It is a doleful spectacle indeed which is presented by the trees, hedge-rows, and what once were running brooks, on which the factory region has lately intruded. The trees stand stripped of their bark, like the last of a garrison subjected to the scalpingknife; ashes load their leaves, and shreds of cotton hang on their branches like ragged offerings on a bush at an Irish holy well. What was lately a babbling brook, “With its cool, melodious sound,” now slobbers along, lukewarm, steaming, and red, blue, or yellow, according to the discharges it receives at different hours of the day. Here, in the remains of a half-stubbed hedge, all leafless and blue-moulded, you may behold a bush of broom; perhaps the last of the growth that once clothed with golden blossoms the long reach of river bank, from hence to the end of the Broomielaw. Industry now blossoms in gold of another opening direct from the street. For from six to ten pounds a year, a workman can lodge himself and his family, comfortably, conveniently, and decently, in one of these tenements. His stair door separates him from the other inmates of the house as effectually as the street door of a householder in one of the courts or lanes of an Irish city. This is one great advantage arising from the use of stone in building, that everything is made solid and independent. A noisy neighbor on the other side of one of those substantial party-walls, or separated by a well-deadened flooring, is as little heard as in a separate dwelling. But it is only in the newer parts of the city that these well-arranged dwellings of the working classes are to be seen. In the wynds and lanes of the old town, the poor are huddled together, as wretchedly as even in the Dublin Liberties. But the artisans, the smiths, carpenters, shipwrights, and most of the better order of workmen, have their dwellings up the clean stone stairs, and in the well-ventilated and thoroughly-drained flats of the secondary streets of the new town. The dress and appearance of this class bespeak comfortable independeuce, in- | plate, china, furniture, and hangings, your telligence, and order. In nothing is the con- eye will be taken with the frequent distrast between the humbler population of Dub- play of the good things of the tablelin and of Glasgow more apparent, than in green-grocer, fruiterer, fishmonger, and fleshthe appearance of the drivers of the public er, all setting forth their wares with the conveyances. Two-wheeled vehicles are not accessorial splendors of plate-glass and gildpermitted to ply for hire; the hackney-cabs ing. There is no part of London or Paris are consequently built as open broughams, more sumptuous in its shop-fronts than Buthe upper panels being glazed. He would chanan-street; and no class of town residents, be an unreasonable traveller who would de- either in London or elsewhere, who are larger sire anything more comfortable or easy than consumers of the good things of life than the these little glass coaches, with their velvet merchants and manufacturers who inhabit cushions and stained transparencies. The the adjoining districts of the new city of drivers array themselves in such costumes as Glasgow. Good living prevails even to the we would see here worn by a land-steward, obstruction of good society. The early hours or even by a country gentleman going about necessary for the pursuits of business prohihis farm. It must be owned, however, that bit balls and soirées. The dinner-table is the after a sixpenny drive from side to side of only point of social re-union; and the tempDublin, the fares of these Glasgow carriages, tations among a wealthy community to outwhich you must pay at the rate of a shilling vie one another in the sumptuousness of those a mile, excite an unpleasing surprise. And state banquets, is anything but conducive to what is worse even than the high rate of easy intercourse; while the time devoted to fares, you are constantly called upon, even an elaborate series of courses leaves little opwithin the city, for tolls. However, all things portunity for cultivating the elegances of the in this great hive of production are dear, ex-drawing-room. Then, during six or seven cept, indeed, coal, which they sell at the pit- months of the year, three out of four of the mouth for three or four shillings a ton; and more respectable families are located at the consequently care not to economize by any sea-side. During this season the town ensmoke-burning apparatus in their furnaces. tertainments are necessarily confined to genIf the coal were dearer, the city would be so tlemen guests; and when the families return much the cleaner; but then, if they had not to town, religious exercises are said to enthat abundance of coal, one-half the city gross the evenings of the ladies, to an extent probably would not be there to be begrimed. that might be curtailed with social advantage. If this were a statistical account of Glasgow, Here again the unhappy smoke is remotely it would remain for the reader to be con- a cause of these drawbacks. Out-door enducted through a succession of trades and joyments are wholly prohibited by it. If the manufactures, including almost every known ladies of Glasgow could walk about in the species of productive industry practised in forenoons without being smutted, they would Britain; some of them, such as iron-founding devise open-air entertainments at which they and the manufacture of vitriol, soda, and the could display themselves and their wardchemical agents of the bleach-field, being car- robes to advantage, and would engage the ried on here on a pre-eminent scale. But it youth in amiable pleasures without ceremony, is time to say something of the minor com- cost, or the ignoble emulation of larders and mercial arrangements for the distribution and plate chests. It is said that the smoke-conretailing of the vast supplies required for suming apparatus (the use of which, it seems, this rich, and, as you shall presently see, lux-is now to be enforced under the act of Parurious population. Passing along the principal streets of retail business, the eye is attracted by the extraordinary display of plate and jewelry, of gilding, and of fine upholstery. There is not much equipage; there seems to be no promenading, no equestrianism; the streets are filled with people intent on business; it is within doors that the citizens of Glasgow indulge the love of splendor, which, strange as it may appear, is one of the most noticeable social characteristics of this hard-working and plain-mannered population. Next to the show of fine liament) is only partially effectual, so that |