is said to be the favorite victim of a worm that bores into his foot and slowly tortures him to death. A gnat, according to a tradition of the Arabs, overcame the mighty Nimrod. Enraged at the destruction of his gods by the prophet Abraham, he sought to slay him, and waged war against him. But the prophet prayed to God, and said, "Deliver me, O God, from this man, who worships stones, and boasts himself to be the lord of all beings;" and God said to him, "How shall I punish him?" And the prophet answered, "To Thee armies are as nothing, and the strength and power of men likewise. Before the smallest of thy creatures will they perish." And God was pleased at the faith of the prophet, and he sent a gnat, which vexed Nimrod night and day, so that he built a room of glass in his palace, that he might dwell therein, and shut out the insect. But the gnat entered also, and passed by his ear into his brain, upon which it fed, and increased in size day by day, so that the servants of Nimrod beat his head with a hammer continually, that he might have some ease from his pain; but he died, after suffering these torments for four hundred years. "The grandiose statues of Michel Angelo," said a traveler, descanting upon the art and architecture of old Rome, "appear to the greatest advantage under the bold arches of Bramante. There--between those broad lines, under those prodigious curves--placed in one of those courts, or near one of the great temples where the perspective is incomplete--the statues of Michel Angelo display their tragic attitudes, their gigantic members, which seem animated by a ray from the divinity, and struggling to mount from earth to heaven. Bramante and Michel Angelo detested but completed each other. Thus it is often in human nature. Those two men knew not that they were laborers in the same work. And history is silent upon such points till death has passed over her heroes. Armies have fought until they have been almost annihilated on the field of battle; men have hated and injured one another by their calumnies; the learned and powerful persecute and seek to blot their fellows from the earth, as if there was not air and space for all; they know not, blinded by their passions, and warped by the prejudices of envy, that the future will blend them in the same glory, that to posterity they will represent but one sentiment. Bramante and Michel Angelo, enemies during life, are reconciled in immortality."