ulate that of the Iliad, and
had chosen as the theme of his verse THE HEROISM OF VIRTUE. Lycidas
would draw his pictures from history, choose his models from men, and
not from the so-called deities with which superstition or fancy had
peopled Olympus. The Athenian had an innate love of the pure and true,
which made him intuitively reject fables, and which, amongst his
countrymen, exposed him to the charge of scepticism. Lycidas could
laugh with Aristophanes at legends of gods and demigods, whom their
very priests represented as having more than the common infirmities and
vices of mortal men. Had Lycidas reared an altar, it would have been
like that which was seen two centuries later in his native city, with
the inscription, To THE UNKNOWN GOD. The Greek knew of no being above
earth whom he could intelligently worship; and his religion consisted
rather in an intense admiration for virtue in the abstract, than in
anything to which his more superstitious countrymen would have given
the name of piety.

To collect materials for his poem on THE HEROISM OF VIRTUE, Lycidas had
travelled far and wide. He had visited Rome, then a powerful republic,
and listened with keen interest to her annals, so rich in stories of
patriotism and self-devotion. The Athenian had then turned his course
eastward, had visited Alexandria, ascended the Nile, gazed on the
Pyramids, even then--more than two thousand years ago--venerable from
their antiquity. After seeing the marvels of the land of the Pharaohs,
Lycidas had travelled by the way of Gaza to Jerusalem, where he was now
residing. He was an occasional guest at the court of the Syrian
monarch, to whom he had brought a letter of introduction from Perseus,
king of Macedonia.

It was not to indulge in pleasant poetic reveries that Lycidas had on
that evening sought the seclusion of the olive-grove, if the direction
of the current of his thoughts might be known by the index of his face,
which wore an expression of indignation, which at times almost flashed
into fierceness, while the silent lips moved, as if uttering words of
stern reproof and earnest expostulation. No one was near to watch the
countenance of the young Greek, until he suddenly met a person richly
attired in the costume worn at the Syrian court, who came upon him in a
spot where the narrowness of the path precluded the two men from
avoiding each other without turning back, and so brought about a
meeting which, to the las