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.

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 on every 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 increase 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

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

The Kelvin now for nearly a mile from its junction with the Clyde is no better than a running sink; and even though its sloppy mill-weirs and little clogged rapids made as much noise as the fall of Foyers, they would hardly be heard amid the outrageous clatter and whizz of the ship-yards, iron works, and spinning factories which lie around its embouchure. Above the fine archway, however, which carries the great western road over Kelvin Glen, the place retains as many of its original charms as muddied waters and the breathings of the smutty south will permit; for, with the wind in any other quarter, this region enjoys a comparatively pure atmosphere; 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

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-fervet 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 of the workmen, in her cost of production. It is a calling up and creation of so much new wealth out of the land of Lanarkshire,

and the minds and muscles of the artisans of

the ship-yard. Little wonder that there are new streets of fine houses on the river banks, where new fleets of fine ships are yearly launched on the river's bosom. Here, too, the artisans have their streets of fine houses as well as the owners and contractors; built of the same cut stone, only not so smoothly chiselled; with the same airy windows, only not of plate-glass; and the same lofty and regular façades, only divided into flats internally, and having a common stair of stone, For from six opening direct from the street. 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- | telligence, and order. In nothing is the contrast between the humbler population of Dublin and of Glasgow more apparent, than in the appearance of the drivers of the public conveyances. Two-wheeled vehicles are not permitted to ply for hire; the hackney-cabs are consequently built as open broughams, the upper panels being glazed. He would be an unreasonable traveller who would desire anything more comfortable or easy than these little glass coaches, with their velvet cushions and stained transparencies. The drivers array themselves in such costumes as we would see here worn by a land-steward, or even by a country gentleman going about his farm. It must be owned, however, that after a sixpenny drive from side to side of Dublin, the fares of these Glasgow carriages, which you must pay at the rate of a shilling a mile, excite an unpleasing surprise. And what is worse even than the high rate of fares, you are constantly called upon, even within the city, for tolls. However, all things in this great hive of production are dear, except, indeed, coal, which they sell at the pitmouth for three or four shillings a ton; and consequently care not to economize by any smoke-burning apparatus in their furnaces. If the coal were dearer, the city would be so much the cleaner; but then, if they had not that abundance of coal, one-half the city probably would not be there to be begrimed. If this were a statistical account of Glasgow, it would remain for the reader to be conducted through a succession of trades and manufactures, including almost every known species of productive industry practised in Britain; some of them, such as iron-founding and the manufacture of vitriol, soda, and the chemical agents of the bleach-field, being carried on here on a pre-eminent scale. But it is time to say something of the minor commercial arrangements for the distribution and retailing of the vast supplies required for this rich, and, as you shall presently see, luxurious 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

plate, china, furniture, and hangings, your eye will be taken with the frequent display of the good things of the tablegreen-grocer, fruiterer, fishmonger, and flesher, all setting forth their wares with the accessorial splendors of plate-glass and gilding. There is no part of London or Paris more sumptuous in its shop-fronts than Buchanan-street; and no class of town residents, either in London or elsewhere, who are larger consumers of the good things of life than the merchants and manufacturers who inhabit the adjoining districts of the new city of Glasgow. Good living prevails even to the obstruction of good society. The early hours necessary for the pursuits of business prohibit balls and soirées. The dinner-table is the only point of social re-union; and the temptations among a wealthy community to outvie one another in the sumptuousness of those state banquets, is anything but conducive to easy intercourse; while the time devoted to an elaborate series of courses leaves little opportunity for cultivating the elegances of the drawing-room. Then, during six or seven months of the year, three out of four of the more respectable families are located at the sea-side. During this season the town entertainments are necessarily confined to gentlemen guests; and when the families return to town, religious exercises are said to engross the evenings of the ladies, to an extent that might be curtailed with social advantage. Here again the unhappy smoke is remotely a cause of these drawbacks. Out-door enjoyments are wholly prohibited by it. If the ladies of Glasgow could walk about in the forenoons without being smutted, they would devise open-air entertainments at which they could display themselves and their wardrobes to advantage, and would engage the youth in amiable pleasures without ceremony, cost, or the ignoble emulation of larders and plate chests. It is said that the smoke-consuming apparatus (the use of which, it seems, is now to be enforced under the act of Parliament) is only partially effectual, so that even though the owners be compelled, by legislative authority, to adopt these improvements, the nuisance will be but half abated. Surely the resources of science have not been taxed to the utmost to devise a cure. When we consider that the furnace only needs draught; that, provided the smoke be withdrawn, it matters not whether it goes up a chimney or along an underground pipe; that the soot which forms it is a ponderous body and would drop into proper reservoirs by its own gravity, if the gases which carry it were