as philosophical. He learned much of the
history of foreign countries, especially of Greece, of its heroes and
sages, its poets and its statesmen, of Alexander, of the Syro-Macedonic
empire, of the Jews, and of the series of conquests through which Rome
advanced to universal dominion.

To impart knowledge is as interesting as to acquire it; and Agellius was
called upon to give as well as to take. The brother and sister, without
showing any great religious earnestness, were curious to know about
Christianity, and listened with the more patience that they had no special
attachment to any other worship. In the debates which ensued, though there
was no agreement, there was the pleasure of mental exercise and
excitement; he found enough to tell them without touching upon the more
sacred mysteries; and while he never felt his personal faith at all
endangered by their free conversation, his charity, or at least his
good-will and his gratitude, led him to hope, or even to think, that they
were in the way of conversion themselves. In this thought he was aided by
his own innocence and simplicity; and though, on looking back afterwards
to this eventful season, he recognized many trivial occurrences which
ought to have put him on his guard, yet he had no suspicion at the time
that those who conversed so winningly, and sustained so gracefully and
happily the commerce of thought and sentiment, might in their actual
state, nay, in their governing principles, be in utter contrariety to
himself when the veil was removed from off their hearts.

Nor was it in serious matters alone, but still more on lighter occasions
of intercourse, that Aristo and Callista were attractive to the solitary
Agellius. She had a sweet thrilling voice, and accompanied herself on the
lyre. She could act the _improvisatrice_, and her expressive features were
a running commentary on the varied meaning, the sunshine and the shade, of
her ode or her epic. She could relate how the profane Pentheus and the
self-glorious Hippolytus gave a lesson to the world of the feebleness of
human virtue when it placed itself in opposition to divine power. She
could teach how the chaste Diana manifests herself to the simple shepherd
Endymion, not to the great or learned; and how Tithonus, the spouse of the
Morn, adumbrates the fate of those who revel in their youth, as if it were
to last for ever; and who, when old, do nothing but talk of the days when
they were young, wearying ot