children in their poisonous folds. This event was regarded as a clear indication of the displeasure of the gods at Laocoön’s irreverent treatment of the wooden horse, which they no longer hesitated to regard as a sacred object, and prepared to introduce with due solemnity into the city. This was done with songs and triumphal acclamations, and the day closed with festivity. In the night the armed men who were enclosed in the body of the horse, being let out by the traitor Sinon, opened the gates of the city to their friends, who had returned under cover of the night. The city was set on fire; the people, overcome with feasting and sleep, put to the sword, and Troy completely subdued. One of the most celebrated groups of statuary in existence is that of Laocoön and his children in the embrace of the serpents. A cast of it is owned by the Boston Athenæum; the original is in the Vatican at Rome. The following lines are from the “Childe Harold” of Byron: “Now turning to the Vatican go see Laocoön’s torture dignifying pain; A father’s love and mortal’s agony With an immortal’s patience blending;—vain The struggle! vain against the coiling strain And gripe and deepening of the dragon’s grasp The old man’s clinch; the long envenomed chain Rivets the living links; the enormous asp Enforces pang on pang and stifles gasp on gasp.” The comic poets will also occasionally borrow a classical allusion. The following is from Swift’s “Description of a City Shower”: “Boxed in a chair the beau impatient sits, While spouts run clattering o’er the roof by fits, And ever and anon with frightful din The leather sounds; he trembles from within. So when Troy chairmen bore the wooden steed Pregnant with Greeks impatient to be freed, (Those bully Greeks, who, as the moderns do, Instead of paying chairmen, run them through); Laocoön struck the outside with a spear, And each imprisoned champion quaked with fear.” King Priam lived to see the downfall of his kingdom and was slain at last on the fatal night when the Greeks took the city. He had armed himself and was about to mingle with the combatants, but was prevailed on by Hecuba, his aged queen, to take refuge with herself and his daughters as a suppliant at the altar of Jupiter. While there, his youngest son Polites, pursued by Pyrrhus, the son of Achilles, rushed in wounded, and expired at the feet of his father; whereupon Priam, overcome with indignation, hurled his spear with feeble hand against Pyrrhus,[24] and was forthwith slain by him.