shields of Numa; the vestals, stoled and veiled and silent, and the mad ministers of Cybele, with their strange instruments of music, leaping and dancing with strange gestures, and waking all the echoes with their barbaric hymnings. After these stately and revered, and almost divine personages, trooped on—strange contrast—a band of mimics and jesters, buffoons with scurrilous songs and obscene gestures, calling forth from the mob of Rome many a plaudit by their licentious wit. Then, with perfumes and steaming censers, scattering bunches of the choicest flowers, all in their purple bordered tunics, with golden balls about their necks, barefooted and bareheaded, the sons of the Patricians passed, the prime of Rome’s young aristocracy. Other musicians followed, and then, caparisoned for war, with castles on their backs and gorgeous housings on their unwieldy carcasses, each driven by a coal-black Ethiopian astride on his huge neck, the captured elephants—an hundred mighty monsters, the like of which had never before gladdened the eyes of the amazed and wonder-stricken populace. Next rolled the wains, slow dragged by snow-white oxen, groaning beneath the weight of the rich spoils of the Numidian empire—armor of gold and silver, weapons thick set with emeralds and diamonds, statues and jars and vases of pure gold—dazzling the eyes and bewildering the senses with their unequalled splendor. Hark! what a roar, a thunder of applause! It is—it is—Io triumphe, Io pæan, it is the mighty Marius! Aloft he stood—aloft in more than regal pomp, in more than mortal glory. The car was ivory and gold, embossed and carved with rare device, drawn by six steeds abreast, white as the driven snow, with manes and tails that literally swept the ground, housed with rich crimson trappings, harnessed and reined with gold. But what were ivory or gold, or what the choicest specimens of mere brute beauty, to the sublime and glorious figure of the triumphant general? Tall, powerful, broad shouldered and strong limbed, as he stood there clad in the tunic and toga of fine crimson, all woven over with palm branches of gold, wearing the laurel crown upon his coal-black locks, and holding in his right hand the ivory sceptre, and in his left a branch of green triumphal bay, he looked the emblem, the very incarnation and ideal of Rome’s undaunted energy. His hair, black as the raven’s wing, was curled in short crisp locks close to his finely formed head and expansive temples; his nose was high, keen, aquiline; his eyes bright as the eagle’s, and, like his, formed as it were to gaze into the very focus of the sun’s beams, and pierce the dunnest war clouds with all-pervading vision; his lips were thin, firm and compressed, with that set iron curve which gives the strongest token of indomitable resolution. Swarthy almost to negro blackness, gloomy and lowering was his brow, and furrowed by deep lines of care and passion—yet was there