speak of such
mad infatuation as a humiliating exhibition of human weakness. Any one
under its fearful spell is an object of pity. But I have more sympathy
for him than for Cleopatra, although she was doubtless a very gifted
woman. He was her victim; she was not his. If extravagant and reckless
and sensual, he was frank, generous, eloquent, brave, and true to her.
She was artful, designing, and selfish, and used him for her own ends,
although we do not know that she was perfidious and false to him. But
for her he would have ruled the world. He showed himself capable of an
enormous sacrifice. She made no sacrifices for him. She could even have
transferred her affections, since she afterwards sought to play her
blandishments upon his rival. Conceive of Antony, if you can, as loving
any one else than her who led him on to ruin. In the very degradation
of love we see its sacredness. In his fidelity we find some palliation.
Nor does it seem that Octavia, the slighted wife of Antony, gave way to
vengeance. Her sense of injury was overshadowed by her pity. This lofty
and dignified matron even took his six surviving children, three of whom
were Cleopatra's, and brought them up in her own house as her own. Can
Paganism show a greater magnanimity?

The fate of Cleopatra was tragic also. She too destroyed herself, not
probably by the bite of asps, as is the popular opinion, but by some
potent and subtile poison that she ever carried with her, and which had
the effect of benumbing the body and making her insensible to pain. Yet
she does not kill herself because she cannot survive the death of
Antony, but because she is too proud to be carried to Rome to grace the
triumph of the new Caesar. She will not be led a captive princess up the
Capitoline Hill. She has an overbearing pride. "Know, sir," says she to
Proculeius, "that I

"Will not wait pinion'd at your master's court,
Nor once be chastis'd with the sober eye
Of dull Octavia....
... Rather a ditch in Egypt
Be gentle grave to me!"

But whether pride or whether shame was the more powerful motive in
committing suicide, I do not read that she was a victim of remorse. She
had no moral sense. Nor did she give way to sentimental grief on the
death of Antony. Her grief was blended with disappointment and rage. Nor
did she hide her head, but wore a face of brass. She used all her arts
to win Octavius. Her resources did not fail her; but she expended them
o