of an
assault the prospects of Paganism had brightened--with the certainty of
a blockade, they sunk immediately into disheartening gloom!

Filled with these thoughts, Ulpius paced backwards and forwards in his
solitary retreat, utterly abandoned by the exaltation of feeling which
had restored to his faculties in the morning, the long-lost vigour of
their former youth. Once more, he experienced the infirmities of his
age; once more he remembered the miseries that had made his existence
one unending martyrdom; once more he felt the presence of his ambition
within him, like a judgment that he was doomed to welcome, like a curse
that he was created to cherish. To say that his sensations at this
moment were those of the culprit who hears the order for his execution
when he had been assured of a reprieve, is to convey but a faint idea
of the fierce emotions of rage, grief, and despair, that now united to
rend the Pagan's heart.

Overpowered with weariness both of body and mind, he flung himself down
under the shade of some bushes that clothed the base of the wall above
him. As he lay there--so still in his heavy lassitude that life itself
seemed to have left him--one of the long green lizards, common to
Italy, crawled over his shoulder. He seized the animal--doubtful for
the moment whether it might not be of the poisonous species--and
examined it. At the first glance he discovered that it was of the
harmless order of its race, and would have flung it carelessly from
him, but for something in its appearance which, in the wayward
irritability of his present mood, he felt a strange and sudden pleasure
in contemplating.

Through its exquisitely marked and transparent skin he could perceive
the action of the creature's heart, and saw that it was beating
violently, in the agony of fear caused to the animal by its
imprisonment in his hand. As he looked on it, and thought how
continually a being so timid must be thwarted in its humble anxieties,
in its small efforts, in its little journeys from one patch of grass to
another, by a hundred obstacles, which, trifles though they might be to
animals of a higher species, were yet of fatal importance to creatures
constituted like itself, he began to find an imperfect, yet remarkable
analogy between his own destiny and that of this small unit of
creation. He felt that, in its petty sphere, the short life of the
humble animal before him must have been the prey of crosses and
disa