As his principal character, France has taken the Titus Ælius Lamia to whom the seventeenth ode of Horace's Third Book is addressed--a gay young Roman who, according to France, is banished by Tiberius for a flagrant love-affair with a consuls wife, goes to Palestine, and meets with a friendly reception in the house of Pontius Pilate. Forty years pass; Ælius Lamia has long been back in Italy; he is at Baiæ, taking the baths, and is sitting one day by a path upon a height reading Lucretius, when, in the occupant of a litter borne past by slaves, it seems to him that he recognises his old host, Pilate. And it really is Pilate, who has come, accompanied by his eldest daughter, now a widow, to take the baths. They talk of old days--of all the trouble Pontius had with those wretched Jews, who refused to do homage to the image of the Emperor on the banners, and allowed themselves to be flogged to death rather than worship it. They continually came to him, too, demanding a sentence of death on some unfortunate creature whose crime he was unable to discover, and who appeared to him to be as mad as his accusers. Lamia declares that Pontius lacked appreciation of the Jews' good qualities, but confesses that his own predilection was in favour of the Jewesses. He recalls an evening on which he saw one of them dancing with uplifted arms to the clang of cymbals, on a ragged carpet in a miserably lighted, wretched drinking-booth. The dance was barbaric, the voice hoarse, but in the motion of the limbs there was sorcery, and the eyes were Cleopatra's. She had heavy red hair, this girl, whose charms enticed the young Roman to follow her everywhere. "But she ran away from me," he continued, when the young lay preacher and miracle-worker came from Galilee to Jerusalem. She became inseparable from him, and joined the little band of men and women who were always with him. "You remember him, of course?" "No," replies Pilate. "His name was Jesus, I think; he was from Nazareth" "I do not remember him," reaffirms Pilate. "You were obliged to have him crucified." "Jesus--" mutters Pilate, "from Nazareth--I have no recollection of it." Here we have a characteristic example of Frances manner of producing his effects, and of his art in its profound truth. So far is he from seeing Pilate's connection with Jesus in the light of later times that he represents him as completely forgetting the whole occurrence, which was an everyday one to him--whilst Lamia only remembers it because of Magdalene.