his clear practical insight: and yet
she despised, mistrusted, all but hated him. But what if his were the
very qualities which were destined to succeed? What if her purer and
loftier aims, her resolutions--now, alas! broken--never to act but on
the deepest and holiest principles and by the most sacred means, were
destined never to exert themselves in practice, except conjointly with
miserable stratagems and cajoleries such as these? What if statecrafts
and not philosophy and religion, were the appointed rulers of mankind?
Hideous thought! And yet--she who had all her life tried to be
self-dependent, originative, to face and crush the hostile mob of
circumstance and custom, and do battle single-handed with Christianity
and a fallen age--how was it that in her first important and critical
opportunity of action she had been dumb, irresolute, passive, the
victim, at last, of the very corruption which she was to exterminate?
She did not know yet that those who have no other means for regenerating
a corrupted time than dogmatic pedantries concerning the dead and
unreturning past, must end, in practice, by borrowing insincerely, and
using clumsily, the very weapons of that novel age which they deprecate,
and 'sewing new cloth into old garments,' till the rent become patent
and incurable. But in the meanwhile, such meditations as these drove
from her mind for that day both Athene, and the ode, and philosophy, and
all things but--Pelagia the wanton.

In the meanwhile, Alexandrian politics flowed onward in their usual pure
and quiet course. The public buildings were placarded with the news of
Heraclian's victory; and groups of loungers expressed, loudly enough,
their utter indifference as to who might rule at Rome--or even at
Byzantium. Let Heraclian or Honorius be emperor, the capitals must be
fed; and while the Alexandrian wheat-trade was uninjured, what matter
who received the tribute? Certainly, as some friends of Orestes found
means to suggest, it might not be a bad thing for Egypt, if she could
keep the tribute in her own treasury, instead of sending it to Rome
without any adequate return, save the presence of an expensive army....
Alexandria had been once the metropolis of an independent empire....
Why not again? Then came enormous largesses of corn, proving, more
satisfactorily to the mob than to the shipowners, that Egyptian wheat
was better employed at home than abroad. Nay, there were even rumours of
a general amnest