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They occupied the large centre-table which has for many a year been the point of contact for the distinguished minds of which the membership of "The Heraclean" is made up; the tennis-net, as it were, over which the verbal balls of discussion have for so many years volleyed to the delight of countless listeners.

He challenged him to show any portrait of these days that could vie with the Helen of Zeuxis, the Heraclean; or any composition equal to the Sacrifice of Iphigenia, by Timanthes, the Sicyonian; not to mention the Twelve Gods of Asclepiodorus, the Athenian, for which Mnason, tyrant of Elatea, gave him about three hundred pounds apiece; or Homer's Hell, by Nicias, who refused sixty talents, amounting to upwards of eleven thousand pounds, and generously made a present of it to his own country.

Even after this he did not offer any violence to the Tarentine territory, not quitting the hope of shaking their allegiance to the Romans, though his simulated lenity had hitherto been of no advantage to him; but as soon as he came to Salapia he collected stores of corn there from the Metapontine and Heraclean lands; for midsummer was now past, and the situation pleased him as a place for winter quarters.

Hence it was that I decided the question in my friend's favor, and a week or two later had him in at "The Heraclean" for luncheon. The dining-room was filled with the usual assortment of interesting men men who had really done something in life and who suffered from none of that selfish modesty which leads some of us to hide our light under the bushel of silence.

But the seventh and eight centuries were a period of discord and darkness: the library was burnt, the college was abolished, the Iconoclasts are represented as the foes of antiquity; and a savage ignorance and contempt of letters has disgraced the princes of the Heraclean and Isaurian dynasties. In the ninth century we trace the first dawnings of the restoration of science.

Something of the Herakles ideal appears again and again in other poems of Browning. His Breton sailor, Hervé Riel, has more than a touch of the Heraclean frankness of gaiety in arduous effort. His Iv

It was called the "Heraclean Stone" by the people, but came at length to bear the name of "Magnet" after the city of Magnesia or the mythical shepherd Magnes, who was said to have discovered it by the attraction of his iron crook.

Moreover, as to the flowing of water, the fall of the thunderbolt, and the marvels that are observed about the attraction of amber and the Heraclean stones, in none of these cases is there any attraction; but he who investigates rightly, will find that such wonderful phenomena are attributable to the combination of certain conditions the non-existence of a vacuum, the fact that objects push one another round, and that they change places, passing severally into their proper positions as they are divided or combined.

The ancients knew that it had the power of communicating its attractive property to iron, for we read in Plato's "Ion" that a number of iron rings can be supported in a chain by the Heraclean Stone. Lucretius also describes an experiment in which iron filings are made to rise up and "rave" in a brass basin by a magnet held underneath.

The vivacity and tenderness of the pictures of domestic life, and the minute knowledge of expiatory ceremonies seem to stamp this idyl as the work of Theocritus. As the following poem also deals with an adventure of Heracles, it seems not impossible that Theocritus wrote, or contemplated writing, a Heraclean epic, in a series of idyls.