tion, and yet being
utterly without power to break from the control of her irresistible
charms.

Yet they were lovers--lovers who sacrificed wealth, ambition, duty,
honor, on the altar of Aphrodite. It was a love which brought
destruction; still, we may charitably account for the weakness exhibited
by each as the natural consequence of that romantic love, than which
history has given us no greater example.

Dire was the fate of Cleopatra. Hopes all frustrated,--Antony dying in
her arms,--Octavius impervious to all her allurements,--rather than
grace the conqueror's triumph, the most fascinating of Greek women ended
her days, according to the prevailing tradition, by the bite of an asp,
in her thirty-ninth year.

Cleopatra's character is a most fascinating and baffling study. Of many
faults and vices she was guilty, but they were characteristic of her
age. Her virtues must have been also many, for had she not possessed
virtues she would not have been loved and admired by all who knew her.
Her faithful attendants, Iras and Charmion, sacrificed themselves over
her dead body, and by their devotion made even the Roman Proculius
exclaim, in the words of Plutarch: "No other woman on earth was ever so
admired by the greatest, so loved by the loftiest. Her fame echoed from
nation to nation throughout the world. It will continue to resound from
generation to generation; but, however loudly men may extol the
bewitching charm, the fervor of the love which survived death, her
intellect, her knowledge, the heroic courage with which she preferred
the tomb to ignominy--the praise of these two must not be forgotten.
Their fidelity deserves it. By their marvellous end they unconsciously
erected the most beautiful monument to their mistress; for what genuine
goodness and lovableness must have been possessed by the woman who,
after the greatest reverses, made it seem more desirable to those
nearest to her person to die rather than to live without her!"

Cleopatra was not a great queen, regarded as a ruler, yet she did a
great service to her country in preserving its independence for a score
of years after it had reached its end by a natural process of
degeneracy; but she accomplished this end by the arts of intrigue.
Cleopatra was too essentially a woman to be a great ruler, having all a
woman's weaknesses, a woman's faults, and yet withal the charms and
graces that make woman beautiful and lovable. Yet when we weigh her
character wit