icious beat of her cymbals--around! with her light robes flowing
back from a jewelled brooch above the knee--singing, sparkling,
undulating, circling, rustling, the Bacchante entranced the heart of the
Rosicrucian. She gleamed before him like the embodiment of enthusiasm.
She was the genius of motion, the divinity of the dance; she was
Terpsichore in the grace of her movements, Euterpe in the ravishing
sweetness of her voice. A thrill of admiration suffused with a deeper
tint even the abhorred cheek of the voluptuary.

By an almost imperceptible degree, the damsel abated the ardour of her
gyrations, her cymbals clashed less frequently, the song faded from her
lip, the flutter of her garments ceased, the vine-fruit drooped upon her
forehead. She stood before the couch palpitating with emotion, and
radiant with a divine beauty. In another instant, she had prostrated
herself upon the earth, for in the decrepit monster of Capreae, she
recognised the lord of the whole world--Tiberius.

"Arise, maiden of Apulia," he said, with an immediate sense that he
beheld another of those innocent damsels, who were stolen from their
pastoral homes on the Peninsula to become the victims of his depravity.
"Arise, and slake my thirst from yonder goblet. The tongue of Tiberius
is dry with the avidity of his passion."

An indescribable loathing entered into the imagination of the Bacchante
even as she lay upon the grass; yet she rose with precipitation and
filled a chalice to the brim with Falernian. Tiberius grasped it with an
eager hand, and his mouth pressed the lip of the cup as if to drain its
ruby vintage to the bottom. Suddenly, however, the eyes of the old man
blazed with a raging light; the scowl of lust was forgotten; the
vindictiveness of a fiend shone in his dilated eyeballs, and, with a
yell of fury, he cast the goblet into the air, crying out that the wine
_boiled like the bowl of Pluto_. He was writhing in one of those
paroxysms of rage, which justified posterity in regarding him as a
madman. The howling of Tiberius resounded among the verdure, as the
rattle of a snake might do when it raises its deadly crest from its lair
among the flowers. Quick as thought at the first sound of those
inexorable accents, the grove was thronged with the revellers. They
jostled each other in their solicitude to minister to the cruelty of the
despot; and that cruelty was as ruthless, and as hell-born, as it was
ingenious and appalling.

Obedi