e showed her to be as cunning and politic as she was
luxurious and pleasure-seeking. Possibly she may have loved so
interesting and brilliant a man as the great Caesar, aside from the
admiration of his position; but he never became her slave, although it
was believed, a hundred years after his death, that she was actually
living in his house when he was assassinated, and was the mother of his
son Caesarion. But Froude doubts this; and the probabilities are that he
is correct, for, like Macaulay, he is not apt to be wrong in facts, but
only in the way he puts them.

Cleopatra was twenty-eight years of age when she first met Antony,--"a
period of life," says Plutarch, "when woman's beauty is most splendid,
and her intellect is in full maturity." We have no account of the style
of her beauty, except that it was transcendent,--absolutely
irresistible, with such a variety of expression as to be called
infinite. As already remarked, from the long residence of her family in
Egypt and intermarriages with foreigners, her complexion may have been
darker than that of either Persians or Greeks. It probably resembled
that of Queen Esther more than that of Aspasia, in that dark richness
and voluptuousness which to some have such attractions; but in grace and
vivacity she was purely Grecian,--not like a "blooming Eastern bride,"
languid and passive and effeminate, but bright, witty, and intellectual.
Shakspeare paints her as full of lively sallies, with the power of
adapting herself to circumstances with tact and good nature, like a
Madame Recamier or a Maintenon, rather than like a Montespan or a
Pompadour, although her nature was passionate, her manner enticing, and
her habits luxurious. She did not weary or satiate, like a mere
sensual beauty.

"Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety."

She certainly had the power of retaining the conquests she had
won,--which rarely happens except with those who are gifted with
intellectual radiance and freshness. She held her hold on Antony for
eleven years, when he was burdened with great public cares and duties,
and when he was forty-two years of age. Such a superior man as he was
intellectually, and, after Caesar, the leading man of the empire,--a
statesman as well as soldier,--would not have been enslaved so long by
Cleopatra had she not possessed remarkable gifts and attainments, like
those famous women who reigned in the courts of the Bourbons in the
sev