That Albert's work

for the second time, a portrait of his wife. was always, to our ideas, underpaid, often not paid at all, is true: but we must remember that he was at this time in receipt of an annual pension from the emperor; and truth compels us to own, that bad management, rather than poverty, was the cause of his pecuniary embarrassments. A constant outlay on curiosities may be remarked in his accounts: and he had at different times, particularly when in Italy, lent large sums: it would appear that generous by nature, and unsuspicious in his transactions, he was seldom so fortunate as to recover the money he was so ready to lend. Yet Fioravanti's statement that he died in want, and was buried at the public expense, is wholly without foundation, and is as much a fable as the tale, once common, that during his absence in Venice in 1506, his wife was reduced to begging her bread, and that he found her doing so at the city gates, on his return; on the contrary, Dürer died worth 6000 florins, and possessed of a large collection of valuables, by the sale of which, Agnes Durer, while she disobliged her husband's friends in general, and his executors in particular, must have added largely to her widowed means. Her own fortune had been sunk immediately after their marriage, in the purchase of the house in the Zisselgasse (now A. Dürer's Strasse), which is shown as having been the scene of the artist's married life: and not far from which now stands Rauch's statue, to the greatest of the painters of Germany. When Dürer returned to this abode and to Nüremberg, it was to sink, as far as regarded royal and foreign notice, into comparative neglect. Other towns had offered to confer their freedom upon him, and even more lucrative honours had been pressed upon his acceptance: but proudly pathetic is his appeal to his native city: he assures her that he claims and values the privilege of sonship, and that he desires to hold the good things of this life as her gift, and hers only. Her spiritual interests lay close to his heart. His opinions, as well as those of Pirkheimer and Tscherte, were well known; as heretical, they made the friends liable at any time to odium and inconvenience, if not to actual persecution: yet, nothing daunted, the painter again set up his easel, and finished in 1526 the noblest of his works-the two panels representing St. Peter with St. John, St. Mark and St. Paul. This picture he bequeathed to Nüremberg; and it originally had an inscription affixed to it, containing a warning to all Christian kings, rulers, and princes, not to add to or take away from the blessed word of God; nor yet to mistake for His decrees words of man's wisdom. This triumphant effort of his genius shows it to us in all its strength. In this

his last masterpiece one can perceive the effects of his studies in the Low Countries, and the influence of Flemish masters on his style; for he has laid aside many of the peculiarities of his old method: his handling is bolder, his colouring deep and rich the draperies fall in simple and majestic lines; and the accessories are kept more subordinate, than was his wont, to the expression of the picture. Display of acquired knowledge, revellings of fancy in wild luxuriance, or colder symbolism, are no longer to be traced. Neither the attitudes nor the effects here are forced: he painted as he desired to teach, and to grasp truth as his own St. Paul grasps the naked and two-edged sword. So, in after-days, he desired, being dead, still to speak to the Franconians.

The portraits of Dürer of this period represent a man broken in body and in spirit: we miss the falling hair, and the gentle expression in features which pain had sharpened. His wife, too, gnawed into his heart,' says Pirkheimer, referring to these years. Yet the intellectual force was unabated: and had God,' continues his friend, granted him a little longer life, 'he would still have brought many rare things to light, and 'given much wonderful art to the world.' He did produce in the last year of his existence two religious pieces-one a head of the Saviour; another a Christ bearing His cross, shaded with grey on grey paper: and this mournful subject is about the latest that ever occupied his pencil. To the last he occupied himself in correcting and improving the new edition of his book on Proportion,' leaving it, however, so unfinished, that it was not ready for publication in Nüremberg, till 1532. Contrary to the advice of Erasmus, it had been written in the vulgar tongue; and the oldest Latin editions of it are from the translation of J. Camerarius, Paris, 1557; and Venice, 1591.

In the spring of 1528 Dürer's fever again attacked him, and on the 6th of April he died. Travellers are familiar with his tomb in the burying-ground of St. John's, without the walls of his native city. Here then let us bid farewell to the diligence of the artist, and the labours of the man, who was to others so patient, to himself so severe; who had the hands of a craftsman, and the soul of a king; for, from the household jars and the narrow streets he has passed to the many mansions:' from Nüremberg's stately castle, and from her blue horizon of Franconian hills, he has emigrated to the beautiful mountains,' and the vexed spirit of the painter has found the implored rest.

ART. III.-1. Recherches sur l'Emplacement de Carthage. Par C. T. FALBE, Capitaine de Vaisseau et Consul-Général de Danemarck. Paris: 1833.

2. Recherches sur la Topographie de Carthage. Par M. DUREAU DE LA MALLE, Membre de l'Institut. Paris: 1835.

3. Fouilles à Carthage. Aux frais et sous la direction de M. BEULÉ, Membre de l'Institut. Paris: 1861.

4. Carthage and her Remains; being an Account of the Excavations and Researches on the Site of the Phoenician Metropolis in Africa and other adjacent places. Conducted under the auspices of Her Majesty's Government. By Dr. N. DAVIS, F.R.G.S., &c. London: 1861.

5. On recent Excavations and Discoveries on the Site of ancient Carthage. Communicated to the Society of Antiquaries, by AUGUSTUS W. FRANKS, Esq., M.A., Director.

WE are told that the Emperor Claudius, whose great ambition it was to obtain a reputation as a writer of history, composed a work on Carthage in eight books; and to give it every chance of surviving to later ages, he built a new lecturehall adjoining the Museum at Alexandria, and provided an endowment for having it publicly read every year. Unfortunately for the gratification of the author's wish, he fell upon times in which the world was moving too fast to allow attention to be wasted upon a work composed in the spirit of an antiquary; and in spite of the illustrious position of the writer, there is every reason to suppose that the Claudian Readers of Punic History' soon found themselves in possession of a sinecure. To the best of our belief, there is only one allusion — and that by no means of a complimentary character to these worthies in subsequent times, and none whatever to the unfortunate book they were paid to recite. Appian, who when a boy had an annual opportunity of listening to it, altogether ignores its existence, although he writes at a period when the new era of prosperity which the cities of North Africa, and especially Carthage, were beginning to enjoy under the auspices of Hadrian and his successor, must have excited more than common interest in their early history.

But it would seem that with nations, as with individuals, a spiritual vitality is the only security against oblivion. Modern Europe can feel a human interest in the doings of Romans, and

VOL. CXIV. NO. CCXXXI.

F

Greeks, and Jews, though separated from them by millenniums; for it recognises in them the sources of law, of science, and of religion; but the feeling awakened by the discoveries of Assyrian and Egyptian antiquity rather resembles that with which we listen to the comparative anatomist as he expounds the organisation of a mastodon or sea-lizard. All is marvellous, but too unlike our own day for us to do more than wonder. We can as little picture to ourselves the hopes and fears and daily interests of the court of Memphis, or of the population which reared the temple of Belus, as we can imagine an existence among woods of tree-ferns filled with browsing iguanodons.

Carthage occupies in the scale of human interest a sort of middle place between the gigantic despotisms of Mesopotamia and Egypt, and the active political organisations of the Hellenic and Italian peninsulas, from which modern civilisation has been inherited. But it is remarkable that even this middle place has been won only by contact (albeit a hostile one) with the latter. Rome destroyed her rival, but in that destruction immortalised her. Carthage exists for us embalmed in the Æneid and the third decade of Livy. The beautiful romance into which the genius of Virgil has worked up the rude material furnished by the local myths of Africa and Italy, has made Dido the type of female confidence betrayed; while the scarcely less poetic narrative of Livy has taught the youthful student to see in Carthage only the country that produced a Hannibal. It is almost painful to strip off the veil with which a foreign literature enveloped the dead corpse, and discover the foul features -the superstition, the cruelty, the blind faction-which disfigured the living body.

The first historical fact which throws any important light upon the political relations of Carthage is the treaty with Rome and some of the other Italian cities, preserved by Polybius. This curious document dates from the year after the expulsion of the Tarquins. It speaks of the members of a federation on both sides, and is curiously illustrative of the semi-piratical character of commercial enterprise in those early times, as well as of the jealous care which watched over the monopoly of a lucrative traffic. The Romans and their allies

- which consist of the Latin towns lying on the Italian seaboard as far south as Terracina-are prohibited from navigating beyond the Fair Point,' a designation which in later times was appropriated to Cape Zebib, although it may be questioned whether in the treaty so strict an interpretation was contemplated. The only exception allowed was the case of compulsion

either by stress of weather or hostile force. In this event, no traffic was allowed to take place with the shore, except for the purpose of obtaining victims to sacrifice, and of repairing damage occasioned by storms; and in any case the intruder was only allowed three clear days of intercourse with the natives. Roman merchants who came for the purpose of traffic to those parts of Sicily which were under Carthaginian control, were to be allowed to trade on the same terms as Carthaginians, but in Sardinia or Africa this was not the case. All sales there had to be made in the presence of a public functionary; and the payment of the value of the merchandise was publicly guaranteed. This arrangement appears to indicate a kind of traffic by guilds of merchants, such as was commonly practised throughout Europe in the middle ages, and prevails at this day in many parts of central Africa. It implies a very imperfect civilisation, and a want of power to enforce the performance of contracts between individuals, which necessitates the united action of a trading company. There are not wanting reasons for believing that a similar system prevailed with regard to the early Greek commerce in Egypt; and until very recently the same principle regulated the traffic between Russia and China at Kiakhta and Maimachin. The last provision in the treaty is perhaps, of all, the most worthy of note, from the indication it affords of the habitual practice of buccaneering on the part of the great commercial republic. The Carthaginians were forbidden to commit any injury upon the Latin cities which owned the Roman supremacy; but with regard to the others, the only way in which Roman jealousy exhibited itself was in an anxiety to prevent their rivals from obtaining a footing in the country under any pretext. Those who landed to pillage were not to capture towns, or, if they captured them, were to give them up to the Romans. The buccaneers were not to pass the night on shore; and, above all, no stronghold was to be erected on the soil. In a second treaty made a little more than a century later, the same principles of policy are even more distinctly manifest, while at the same time the extension of the Carthaginian power is exhibited, and apparently also the growth of popular influence on the internal administration of the govern

ment.

It is worth while to pause for a moment to give a glance on the condition of the civilised world at this time. Rome, her future career undreamed of, was anxiously struggling against the hordes of Gauls which still occupied the Alban hills, and plundered the plains of Latium. The shores of Antium, the marshy woods of Laurentium, and the mouths of the Tiber