"While Cicero was quæstor in Sicily--the first public office which he ever held, and the only one to which he was then eligible, being but just thirty years old--he paid a visit to Syracuse, then among the greatest cities of the world. The magistrates of the city of course waited on him at once, to offer their services in showing him the lions of the place, and requested him to specify anything which he would like particularly to see. Doubtless they supposed that he would ask immediately to be conducted to some one of their magnificent temples, that he might behold and admire those splendid works of art with which --notwithstanding that Marcellus had made it his glory to carry not a few of them away with him for the decoration of the Imperial City--Syracuse still abounded, and which soon after tempted the cupidity, and fell a prey to the rapacity, of the infamous Verres. "Or, haply, they may have thought that he would be curious to see and examine the Ear of Dionysius, as it was called--a huge cavern, cut out of the solid rock in the shape of a human ear, two hundred and fifty feet long and eighty feet high, in which that execrable tyrant confined all persons who came within the range of his suspicion, and which was so ingeniously contrived and constructed that Dionysius, by applying his ear to a small hole, where the sounds were collected as upon a tympanum, could catch every syllable that was uttered in the cavern below, and could deal out his proscription and his vengeance accordingly upon all who might dare to dispute his authority or to complain of his cruelty. Or they may have imagined, perhaps, that he would be impatient to visit at once the sacred fountain of Arethusa; and the seat of those Sicilian Muses whom Virgil so soon after invoked in commencing that most inspired of all uninspired compositions, which Pope has so nobly paraphrased in his glowing and glorious Eclogue--the 'Messiah.'