sought to impress the beauty of Greek symbolism upon his subjects by ocular demonstration. He organized dispensaries of food and the vital necessities for the poor of all sects, and deflected large sums from the imperial treasury to these dopots for the relief of the pauper class.

Julian sought to convert by many subterfuges. In addition to the few whom his propaganda enveloped by exhortation and the many professional apostates, seekers of court favor who rushed to his arms, the emperor sought to influence waverers and staunch Christians variously. He offered imperial favor to those who would throw off the incubus of Christianity and again worship the gods of their forefathers. He reviewed his army and required each legionary-pagan and Christian aliketo throw incense upon a pagan altar as he passed before his eyes. Casting the incense was thus made conditional to loyalty to Rome. He exibited his portrait in frequented public places together with a likeness of some Greek god, and all citizens were required to bow before the representation of a Roman emperor. Here was a nice dilemma for the Christian passerby who desired neither to break a Roman statute nor to bend to an odious Olympic deity. Very few of his converts were desirable characters. The men who measured up to Julian's desires were few and scattered, and they needed no converting. Human beings such as he sought could not be found for his priesthood. Practically every religious official appointed by him was a conscienceless embezzler, who changed faith, sect, and faction as the throne shifted. To a man, the high-priests of Julian might number their apostasies by the changes of state religion. The money appropriated for a poor relief got no nearer its object than the large pocket of some dispenser of the imperial charities.

And Julian saw it-saw it all. Not at once, but rapidly the mask fell, and he viewed the hollowness of his edifice. Those who bowed to the altar of Apollo did not worship, and outward expression satisfied Julian only when it divulged inward conviction. He saw the purity of his pageants and priesthood befouled by the unavoidable presence of courtesans and misers. He felt keenly the antipathetic attitude of his Christian subjects. The personal insults hurled at him by the citizens of

Antioch, pagan as well as Christian, lifted a veil, and he bitterly realized that he was casting his consecrated pearls before swine. His was a soul too haughty-or lofty-for communion of the heart with his brother philosophers, and he loved no woman on this earth. His tremendous yearnings were scarcely apprehended by any living being; and he realized it. But he clinched his jaws tightly and fought to the death, nor did his disappointment ever spur him to intolerance. He refused to assuage his propagandist defeat with libations of blood. Always to the public he remained the same decisive, enigmatic, inkdauber. Always to his legionaries was he the heroic leader and tireless swordsman,—their big brother. Always became he the philosopher and author when hours of darkness were upon the land, and his Empire slept.

Was the ice of despair in his heart when he so rashly exposed himself in Persia? Did he realize that Hellenism could only exist by becoming Christianity? And his religion was not a quibble to him! Rather than dishonor it, he was willing to see his soul's desire fade into the infinite. There can be no compromise where belief is so ardent. He was the lonesomest man that ever stood in the gaze of the world; the bravest man that ever strove to catch the tide in a sieve.

The sun-his Sun-rose upon him, and he stretched his crimsoned face to the god and soared aloft. The sun rode above him, and still he gazed, bronze-like, into the heavens, and men knew him not. The sun set upon him and his purpled visage followed the godhead to its grave, but men saw only a dying emperor with a javelin wound in his shattered side.

SIDNEY J. COHEN.

University of South Carolina.

PORTRAIT OF A LADY: MADAME DE SÉVIGNÉ

Merely as a literary figure, as a writer, Madame de Sévigné amply justifies her claim to celebrity in the greatest age of French letters. As a mistress of style she is the worthy contemporary of Molière, Corneille, Pascal, and La Fontaine.

Yet she wrote only letters and wrote those letters as naturally as she talked. Just before her came Balzac and Voiture, who wrote epistles, after the fashion of Pliny and James Howell. Now Madame de Sévigné knows that she writes well and takes pride in it, just as Cicero did; but, like him, she knows that letters, to be of any interest, must be sincere, must be written for matter, not manner. Hers, she says, flow from her heart direct, pour fourth all the passion, the curiosity, the laughter of the moment. Often she does not even reread them before sending. The far-fetched felicities of a laborious writer fill her with disgust. Of the style of one such she says, "It is insupportable to me. I had rather be coarse than be like her. She makes me forget delicacy, refinement, and politeness, for fear of falling into her juggler's tricks. Now isn't it sad to become just a mere peasant?"

Peasant or not, she makes the whole wide world of the French seventeenth century live in her letters, as does Saint-Simon in his memoirs somewhat later, and in Madame de Sévigné it lives more vividly, if in Saint-Simon more profoundly. The great affairs of princes and their petty humanness, the splendor of war and its hideous cruelty, intrigues of courtiers, intrigues of lovers, new books, prayers, fashion, folly, tears, and laughter, all mingle in her pages and help us understand to-day and tomorrow by their deep and startling similitude with yesterday. As "human documents" these letters have rarely been surpassed.

But the most interesting thing in her letters is her soul, and she lays bare every fold and fibre of it without the slightest bravado of self-revelation, but also without any attempt at reserve or concealment. She defies our minutest curiosity, because she could,

to pity me for. I am naturally happy and get on with everything and am amused with everything." So, if the song of a nightingale could fill her eyes with tears, in another instance, like the merry Phædra, she could "laugh at shaking of the leaves light." It is she who invented that exquisite spring phrase, "the singing woods," she who calls herself "lonely as a violet, easy to be hid," she who knows the love of mute insensate things: "I understand better than anyone in the world the sort of attachment one has for inanimate objects." How fresh and charming is the picture of her wading in the morning dew up to her knees to take an eager survey of her open-air possessions.

With that other joy of solitude, books, she is as engaging and as frank as with the natural world. It would be absurd to think of her as a pedant, or a blue-stocking. Any call of the normal feminine pursuits of life found her quickly and readily responsive, her best books cast into a corner, forgotten. Yet she did love them. "When I step into this library, I cannot understand why I ever step out of it." She can pass long hours wholly absorbed in new authors, or old ones. Her comments on the great French literature that was springing up about her are always fresh, shrewd, and suggestive. Of Racine's religious plays she says: "Racine has outdone himself; he loves God as he loves his mistresses; he enters into sacred things as he did into profane." La Fontaine she prized as one born under the same planet. He was gay like her, tender like her, loved the birds and flowers like her, and, like her, kept his tears in the closest contact with his laughter. I feel a certain yearning even in the words with which she socially condemns him: "You can only thank God for such a man and pray to have nothing to do with him.”

But novels, novels! Assuredly no one ever loved them more than Madam de Sévigné, those interminable ten-volume romances of chivalry and sentiment, which she pored over as later generations pored over Richardson, or Scott, or Dumas, or Victor Hugo. No one has ever expressed more vivaciously than she the fascination we feel in these books, even when our cooler judgment laughs at them: "The style of La Calprenède is wretched in a thousand places: the swelling, romantic phrases, the illassorted words, I feel them all. I admit that such language is