ian's assumption of the purple? If _after_, how, then, could
the injured husband have received that advice from Titus (as to
repairing his loss by a second marriage), which forms part of an
anecdote and a _bon-mot_ between Titus and Lamia? Yet again, if not
after but before, how was it Lamia had not invoked the protection of
Vespasian, or of Titus--the latter of whom enjoyed a theatrically fine
reputation for equity and moderation?

For some years the wrong has been borne in silence: the sufferer knew
himself to be powerless as against such an oppressor; and that to show
symptoms of impotent hatred was but to call down thunderbolts upon his
own head. Generally, therefore, prudence had guided him. _Patience_ had
been the word; _silence_, and below all the deep, deep word--_wait_; and
if by accident he were a Christian, not only that same word _wait_ would
have been heard, but this beside, look under the altars for others that
also wait. But poor suffering patience, sense of indignity that is
hopeless, must (in order to endure) have saintly resources. Infinite
might be the endurance, if sustained only by a finite hope. But the
black despairing darkness that revealed a tossing sea self-tormented and
fighting with chaos, showing neither torch that glimmered in the
foreground, nor star that kept alive a promise in the distance,
violently refused to be comforted. It is beside an awful aggravation of
such afflictions, that the lady herself might have co-operated in the
later stages of the tragedy with the purposes of the imperial ruffian.
Lamia had been suffered to live, because as a living man he yielded up
into the hands of his tormentor his whole capacity of suffering; no part
of it escaped the hellish range of his enemy's eye. But this advantage
for the torturer had also its weak and doubtful side. Use and monotony
might secretly be wearing away the edge of the organs on and through
which the corrosion of the inner heart proceeded. On the whole,
therefore, putting together the facts of the case, it seems to have been
resolved that he should die. But previously that he should drink off a
final cup of anguish, the bitterest that had yet been offered. The lady
herself, again--that wife so known historically, so notorious, yet so
total a stranger to man and his generations--had she also suffered in
sympathy with her martyred husband? That must have been known to a
certainty in the outset of the case, by him that knew too profou