e little temple, as they endeavoured to pass it on
their onward way, presented a dread reality of death, to embody the
madman's visions of battle and slaughter. As these victims of famine
lay expiring in the street, they heard above them his raving voice
cursing them for Christians, triumphing over them as defeated enemies
destroyed by his hand, exhorting his imaginary adherents to fling the
slain above on the dead below, until the bodies of the besiegers of the
temple were piled, as barriers against their living comrades, round its
walls. Sometimes his frenzy gloried in the fancied revival of the foul
and sanguinary ceremonies of Pagan superstition. Then he bared his
arms, and shouted aloud for the sacrifice; he committed dark and
nameless atrocities--for now again the dead and the dying lay before
him, to give substance to the shadow of his evil thoughts; and Plague
and Hunger were as creatures of his will, and slew the victim for the
altar ready to his hands.

At other times, when the raving fit had passed away, and he lay panting
in the darkest corner of the interior of the temple, his insanity
assumed another and a mournful form. His voice grew low and moaning;
the wreck of his memory--wandering and uncontrollable--floated back,
far back, on the dark waters of the past; and his tongue uttered
fragments of words and phrases that he had murmured at his father's
knees--farewell, childish wishes that he had breathed in his mother's
ear--innocent, anxious questions which he had addressed to Macrinus,
the high priest, when he first entered the service of the gods at
Alexandria. His boyish reveries--the gentleness of speech and poetry of
thought of his first youthful days, were now, by the unsearchable and
arbitrary influences of his disease, revived in his broken words,
renewed in his desolate old age of madness and crime, breathed out in
unconscious mockery by his lips, while the foam still gathered about
them, and the last flashes of frenzy yet lightened in his eyes.

This unnatural calmness of language and vividness of memory, this
treacherous appearance of thoughtful, melancholy self-possession, would
often continue through long periods, uninterrupted; but, sooner or
later, the sudden change came; the deceitful chain of thought snapped
asunder in an instant; the word was left half uttered; the wearied
limbs started convulsively into renewed action; and as the dream of
violence returned and the dream of peace van