Why is Cleopatra so fair of skin, though an Egyptian by birth? Her attendant maidens on this fairy-like barge stand round her like dusky figures cut from bronze; but her fair face and limbs gleam with pale ivory-tints, and the sunshine even glimmers in her dark tresses, now coiled in the Grecian knot behind her shell-like ears. Though Egypt was her birthplace, Grecian blood flows through her veins, and whitens her skin, and lightens the dusky shadows in her hair, and gives the brown shadings to her lustrous eyes; and Grecian culture gives her voice its oft-narrated magic charm of melting sweetness; and a spark of Grecian genius quickens her powers of mind, and gives her the enchanting fascination of brilliant wit, and a native aptitude of acquiring knowledge, and all the polite arts and sciences; and her Grecian free-born grace lends to her form its perfect pose of queenly stateliness, together with an irresistible charm in every easy motion of rounded limb, and unstudied naturalness of action. The agile litheness of the Greek is combined with the oriental voluptuous indolence of the Egyptian; which combination explains the otherwise unaccountable, weird, and subtle allurements of face and form which history, romance, and poetry have acceded to her. Shakespeare calls her “the serpent of old Nile,” “this great fairy,” “great Egypt”; and Horace gives to her the name of “fatal prodigy.” Leigh Hunt describes her as “... That southern beam, The laughing queen that caught the world’s great hands.” Another writer says of her: “She was born a princess, reigned a queen, won an emperor, swayed a hero, and defeated a conqueror. We think of her as the queen of enslavers more than as queen of Egypt. Cleopatra is enthroned enchantress of the world. She, of all her sex, in her person, gave to the unworthy art of coquetry a something magnificent and lustrous in its so potent exercise. Hers was the poetry of coquetry.” Even the scene of Cleopatra in her gorgeous barge upon the river Cydnus does not give a complete picture of this wonderful story. In the background we must paint the Mediterranean Sea, which she has crossed in her journey thither; and then beyond looms up the city of Alexandria, on the further side; and by it flows the marvellous river Nile, through the fertile valley irrigated yearly by its overflowing waters; and high in the background, towering over all else in the picture, stand the majestic pyramids, like huge sentinels, guarding the unknown secrets of Egypt’s wondrous history. Yes, to rightly comprehend the significance of the life of the famous Cleopatra, a panorama of changing scenes, covering centuries of time, would be needed. But we can only take a bird’s-eye view of those old lands of weird and endless enchantment.