uresque in a sublime
and grandiose style than forbidding. There is even one spot planted
with magenta-coloured mesembrianthemums of dazzling brightness; and
the air is loaded with the drowsy perfume of lemon-blossoms. Yet
this is the scene of a great agony. This garden was once the
Gethsemane of a nation, where 9000 free men of the proudest city of
Greece were brought by an unexampled stroke of fortune to slavery,
shame, and a miserable end. Here they dwindled away, worn out by
wounds, disease, thirst, hunger, heat by day and cold by night,
heart-sickness, and the insufferable stench of putrefying corpses.
The pupils of Socrates, the admirers of Euripides, the orators of
the Pnyx, the athletes of the Lyceum, lovers and comrades and
philosophers, died here like dogs; and the dames of Syracuse stood
doubtless on those parapets above, and looked upon them like wild
beasts. What the Gorgo of Theocritus might have said to her friend
Praxinoe on the occasion would be the subject for an idyll _a la_
Browning! How often, pining in those great glaring pits, which were
not then curtained with ivy or canopied by olive-trees, must the
Athenians have thought with vain remorse of their own Rhamnusian
Nemesis, the goddess who held scales adverse to the hopes of men,
and bore the legend 'Be not lifted up'! How often must they have
watched the dawn walk forth fire-footed upon the edge of those bare
crags, or the stars slide from east to west across the narrow space
of sky! How they must have envied the unfettered clouds sailing in
liquid ether, or traced the far flight of hawk and swallow, sighing,
'Oh that I too had the wings of a bird!' The weary eyes turned
upwards found no change or respite, save what the frost of night
brought to the fire of day, and the burning sun to the pitiless cold
constellations.

A great painter, combining Dore's power over space and distance with
the distinctness of Flaxman's design and the colouring of Alma
Tadema, might possibly realise this agony of the Athenian captives
in the stone quarries. The time of day chosen for the picture should
be full noon, with its glare of light and sharply defined vertical
shadows. The crannies in the straight sides of the quarry should
here and there be tufted with a few dusty creepers and wild
fig-trees. On the edge of the sky-line stand parties of Syracusan
citizens with their wives and children, shaded by umbrellas, richly
dressed, laughing and triumphing over the mi