been different. His authority was absolute in Greece, and his resources without end. Even had he been beaten in one or two battles, he could easily have summoned new contingents from Greece, from Macedon, from his Asiatic territories. He could have piled in not merely thirty thousand Macedonians, but double that force, with myriads of Syrians, Persians, and Greeks, with chariots, elephants, and horsemen. He could have exhausted the Roman armies in a twelve-month. Hannibal was always in need of a good engineer corps and siege apparatus. Alexander possessed an excellent supply of these. accessories. He would have pressed right on to the siege of Rome, and the Roman capital would have fallen as Tyre fell. And the republic would have expired when the capital fell.

Another question that has been the occasion of much dispute is the more familiar one of Hannibal's chance of conquering Rome if he had not stopped at Capua. It has always been fashionble to suppose that Hannibal was guilty of a great military error in going into winter quarters, and submitting his men to the luxuries and Circean blandishments of the splendid Campanian capital. He should have marched on while Rome was paralyzed by the defeat of Cannæ, and attacked the capital itself. But had Hannibal done this latter thing, instead of fifteen years of victorious occupancy of Italy, he would have met with instantaneous and irrevocable defeat. In the first place, Hannibal's men were mercenaries, Numidians and Spaniards, fierce desert men and wilder clansmen from the hills of interior Spain, that he and his father had trained. They were fitted only for fighting in the field, and had not the determination and the pertinacity to participate

in the long and tedious siege of a powerful walled city. Secondly, Hannibal had no engineers or apparatus for a siege, and no means to organize a force of this nature. Thirdly, the idea of twenty thousand regular troops, aided perhaps by as many irregular Italian allies, even if they had possessed all the necessary siege equipments, laying leaguer to a city whose men were all warriors, and which could summon from her Italian tributaries two hundred and fifty thousand conscripts, is in itself preposterous. Hannibal would have been crushed in a moment.

Hannibal excelled in the qualities of a deplomat as well as those of a military chieftain. His emissaries were already at work among the Italian cities. His great project was to raise Italy in insurrection against Rome. The Roman conquests of that country had been so thorough, her system of colonization so perfect, that Italy in one sense was Rome, and Rome Italy. Therefore, he could not hope to prevail against Rome while all the Italian cities were free and ready to aid her. He wished to detach them from their allegiance to the republic, incorporate their soldiers into his army, and then he could march on to the capital with no enemy behind him. Meanwhile, he needed some city for headquarters; and Capua the opulent, Capua whose walls were seven miles in circumference, Capua the second city of Italy in strength and the first in wealth, offered suitable accommodations.

That Hannibal's plans did not succeed was through no fault of his. Only paltry aid was granted him by Carthage. The Italian tribes, long held in subservience to the military despotism of Rome, were slow to rally under the Carthaginian banners. Lastly, the de

feat of his brother, who was advancing from Spain to aid him, completely destroyed all chances of his success. "I see the doom of Carthage," groaned the chieftain, when the head of the unfortunate Hasdrubal was thrown into his camp in Apulia. But he did not yet give up the field. Once, in fact, he appeared before Rome, but it was an act of mere bravado on his part. His army was small, and he was unprovided with material for a siege. Rome was strongly fortified, and would have laughed all his toils to scorn. He flitted from place to place, the Romans never daring to meet him in the field; and after a few years the needs of his own country, that was lying at the mercy of Scipio, called him home. As explanatory of his defeat at Zama, it must be remembered that he had only raw and inexperienced troops-many of them the merchants and the young patricians of Carthage, unaccustomed to toil to pit against the experienced legions of Scipio. The fact that he made as good defence as he did alone justifies the homage which is still paid to the genius of Hannibal.

Did Cæsar pause on the Rubicon? No, we answer, despite the assertions of many to the contrary. Why should he have paused? What reason was there for his doing so? We know none. Yet Plutarch says that he paused, enumerating the calamities which the passage of that river would bring upon the world, and the reflections that might be made upon it by posterity. At last exclaiming, "The die is cast!" he drove his horse into the stream, and Rome was free no more. The tale reads like a passage from a romance, and is evidently a fiction. Although rhetorical writers of later times have delighted to refer to

this dramatic scene somewhat in the style of J. Sheridan Knowles, there are both critical and internal evidence that it is a fraudulent piece of history, either written for dramatic effect, or intended as a libel on Cæsar.

Let us glance at the authorities. Several writers give us the history of that interesting and important epoch. First of all is the unrivalled narrative of the great commander himself, who wrote as ably as he fought battles or practised state - craft. Yet Cæsar, in his Commentaries, makes no mention of this incident.

His simple narrative

reads, that at nightfall he left Ravenna secretly, crossed the Rubicon in the night, and at daybreak entered Ariminum. Of Livy's history of this age, we have only the Epitomes; but these Epitomes form a complete, though of course far from a detailed, narrative. Yet in them is no allusion to Cæsar's halting at the Rubicon. If such an event had happened, Livy must have known of it, for he lived in the succeeding generation; and, if he had heard of it, there is no reason why he should not have recorded it. Nor do Dion Cassius or Velleius, in their histories, mer living in the time of Alexander Severus, the latter in that of Tiberius,— seem to know any thing about such an incident.

the for

Suetonius, in his "Lives of the Cæsars," was the first to mention it. Who was Suetonius? He was a Roman biographer who lived in the time of the Emperor Hadrian, one hundred and thirty years after our era, and was the author of the "Lives of the First Twelve Cæsars," in eight books. They have little critical value, and abound in details and anecdotes of a questionable character. The next author who speaks of the incident is Plutarch, whom we

have already quoted. Plutarch was a Greek writer contemporary with Suetonius, whose parallel "Lives of Greek and Roman Commanders" are among the most useful and popular of ancient compositions. But Plutarch has very little historical value, and he is regarded as authority only when his statements coincide with those of other writers. In fact, he himself tells us that he does not write history: he writes the lives of great men, with a moral purpose. His life of Julius Cæsar is the most imperfect in the whole series. It is a confused jumble of facts snatched from different sources, without order, consistency, regularity, or accuracy. writer seemed to labor like a man under restraint. He skimmed over all of Cæsar's great actions, and manifestly showed a satisfaction when he could draw the attention of the reader to other characters and circumstances, however insignificant. Where he derived his information concerning the dramatic incident of the great captain's anxious pause on the banks of the Italian river, we do not know; but this we know, that no reliable historian, contemporary or otherwise, has made mention of it.

The

The internal evidences are still stronger that Cæsar never acted the part ascribed to him on the Rubicon. Cæsar was not the man to hesitate after he had once determined on a thing. If he ever possessed doubts at all, they were all settled before he summoned his legions to march out of Cisalpine Gaul. The idea of his stopping in full march, and anxiously weighing the probable consequences of one irremediable step, is not consistent with Cæsar's character. He had calculated his chances, examined the whole field from every point of view,

before he left Ravenna. He never undertook an enterprise until he had carefully examined the chances of success; and, when once he had determined upon his course, his audacity and his despatch confounded his enemies, and his genius overthrew them.

Why should Cæsar have paused on the Rubicon? You answer that he was a rebel marching to enslave his country. But Rome was already enslaved. The Rome of the Fabii and the Cornelii was no more. Her republican institutions had been overthrown by Marius, by Sulla, by Pompey. Ten years previous her territories had been parcelled among the triumvirs. Cæsar was no upstart rebel. The strife was not between principles or parties, but it was a strife for power between two individuals. That Pompey was the representative of the senatorial party, made it no better for him, but worse; for it had been the subserviency of the senate that at first paved the way for the dictators and the triumvirs. That Cæsar was the representative of the people, did indeed. better his circumstances; for Rome was. free, you say. Pompey and the senate fled: the people welcomed him. Cæsar was no rebel then; or, if a rebel, Pompey was a tyrant. If Pompey was a tyrant,. then Cæsar, instead of being a base, dishonorable wretch plotting to overthrow his country, was rather an ardent patriot seeking to deliver her. Surely there was no more need of Cæsar pausing on the Rubicon than there was of Washington pausing on the bank of the Delaware, when he was about to attack the Hessians; and as the latter did not hesitate, we have no reason to believe the other did.

It has been strongly doubted whether Jeanne d'Arc ever suffered the punishment that has made her a martyr,

There are good grounds, it is also asserted, for believing that the pretty tale of Abelard and Heloise is a pure fiction.

Nobody has yet unriddled the mystery of the man in the iron mask, and nobody seems likely to do so. Of the various theories advanced by different writers, some are more probable than others. It is not likely that he was the Duke of Monmouth, or a bastard son of Anne of Austria, or a twin brother of Louis XIV. He was probably a political offender, or else a rival of the king in one of his numerous amours. Still, his identity remains unsettled, a problem as uncertain as that regarding the identity of the writer of the famous "Junius" letters. These are two insoluble enigmas, impenetrable mysteries, that baffle solutions, and about which perhaps the public has become tired of surmises.

An extremely witty and characteristic anecdote of the late Lord Beaconsfield

will bear repetition in this connection. An adherent from a distant county brought his two sons to the then Mr. Disraeli, and asked him to give them a word of advice on their introduction into life. "Never try to ascertain," said the illustrious statesman to the eldest boy, "who was the man who wore the iron mask, or you will be thought a terrible bore. Nor do you," turning to the second, "ask who was the author of 'Junius,' or you will be thought a bigger bore than your brother."

Walpole wrote an ingenious work to show taking for his base the conflicting statements in history and biography — that no such person as Richard the Third of England ever existed, or that, if he did, he could not have been a tyrant or a hunchback. "Historic Doubts Relative to Napoleon Bonaparte " was published in London in 1820, and created widespread amusement because of its many clear strokes of humor and satirical pungency. Napoleon, who was at the time a captive at St. Helena, admired the composition greatly. Archbishop Whately and Sydney were each reported to be the authors. Since the publication of that sketch, numerous imitations have been issued; but none have shown much originality or literary skill, and have therefore vanished into the darkness of merited oblivion.

THREE young men, who were travelling together in Italy, found themselves one day in the museum at Naples, where the results of the excavations in Herculaneum and Pompeii are exhibited.

They strolled through the halls; and when one of them discovered any thing curious he called his companions in a loud tone, to the great scandal of the taciturn English people who were present.

But the youngest of these three stood absorbed before one of the alcoves, and paid no attention to the cries of his friends. The object that he was looking at so intently was a mass of hardened ashes which contained the imprint of a human form. It had the appearance of a piece of the mould for a statue, broken by a fall: the eye of an artist would readily detect the form of the side and breast of a beautiful figure, as pure in style as a Greek statue. The traveller's guide will tell you that this lava formed around the body of a woman, and preserved its beautiful contour. Thanks to a caprice of the eruption which destroyed four cities, this noble form, turned into dust centuries ago, has been preserved for us the soft roundness of a neck has survived the centuries in which so many empires have disappeared, leaving no trace.

Seeing that he obstinately refused to be turned from his contemplation, Max and Fabio returned to him, and touched him on the shoulder, upon which he trembled like a man surprised in some guilty action. Evidently he had been

too much absorbed to hear their approach.

"Come, Octavio," said Max, "don't spend the day at each alcove, or we shall miss the train, and not get to Pompeii till night."

"What are you looking at?" added Fabio. "Ah! the cast found in the house of Arrius Diomedes." And he gave a rapid and curious glance at Octavio.

The latter blushed, and taking Max's arm they finished the museum without further incident. On getting outside, they at once called a carriage, and proceeded to the railway station. The corricolo, with its huge red wheels, is too well known to need a description here; and, besides, we are not writing a story of Naples, but a simple, though strange, adventure, which may seem incredible, yet still is true.

The road to Pompeii follows the sea almost all the way, and the long white waves come rolling in upon the dark sand with a pleasant murmur. This beach is formed of powdered lava and cinders, and makes a fine contrast to the deep blue of the heavens and the white foam of the breakers.