tish arts. "A queen, a siren," says Thomas Campbell, "a
Shakespeare's Cleopatra alone could have entangled Shakespeare's
Antony." And Shakespeare alone, as declared by Mrs. Jameson, "has dared
to exhibit the Egyptian Queen with all her greatness and all her
littleness, all her paltry arts and dissolute passions, yet awakened our
pity for fallen grandeur without once beguiling us into sympathy with
guilt."

Yet the plain history of this "Sorceress of the Nile," with her
"infinite variety," as told by Plutarch and the other ancients, and
retold, with whatever advantages gained from critical research, by the
modern masters, makes the same impression of moral contrast and
inscrutability as that imparted by the greatest poet who has dramatized
the character of Cleopatra.)

Now at last Egypt, coming into close connection with the world's
masters, becomes the stage for some of the most striking scenes in
ancient history. They seem to most readers something new and
strange--the pageants and passions of the fratricide Cleopatra as
something unparalleled--and yet she was one of a race in which almost
every reigning princess for the last two hundred years had been swayed
by like storms of passion, or had been guilty of like daring violations
of common humanity. What Arsinoe, what Cleopatra, from the first to the
last, had hesitated to murder a brother or a husband, to assume the
throne, to raise and command armies, to discard or adopt a partner of
her throne from caprice in policy, or policy in caprice? But hitherto
this desperate gambling with life had been carried on in Egypt and
Syria; the play had been with Hellenistic pawns--Egyptian or Syrian
princes; the last Cleopatra came to play with Roman pieces, easier
apparently to move than the others, but implying higher stakes, greater
glory in the victory, greater disaster in the defeat. Therefore is it
that this last Cleopatra, probably no more than an average specimen of
the beauty, talent, daring, and cruelty of her ancestors, has taken an
unique place among them in the imagination of the world, and holds her
own even now and forever as a familiar name throughout the world.

Ptolemy Auletes, when dying, had taken great care not to bequeath his
mortgaged kingdom to his Roman creditors. In his will he had named as
his heirs the elder of his two sons, and his daughter, who was the
eldest of the family. Nobody thought of claiming Egypt for a heritage of
the Roman Republic, whe