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But the graciousness in the conception of the character of Sardanapalus, is not to be found only in these sentiments of his meditations, but in all and every situation in which the character is placed. When Salamenes bids him not sheath his sword 'Tis the sole sceptre left you now with safety, the king replies
"Will you take a glass of eau sucree?" asked the Vicomtesse, interrupting Derville. "I should be glad of it." "But I can see nothing in this that can touch our concerns," said Mme. de Grandlieu, as she rang the bell. "Sardanapalus!" cried Derville, flinging out his favorite invocation.
The pungent smoke made Austin cough and blink. "It must indeed be an exciting life," he ventured; "quite delirious, to judge from what you say." "It requires a cool head," replied Sardanapalus, with a stoical shrug. "Ah! there's the bell," he added, as a loud ting was heard outside. "The curtain's going up. Now hurry away to the front, and see the last act.
In later inscriptions "king" is everywhere attached to the name of the God Hea, which fact shows that the titles ascribed to her were those particularly coveted by royalty. Hence we are not surprised to find that in an inscription of Sardanapalus, in the British Museum, there "occurs a remarkable phrase in which the king takes the titles of Hea."
Buried beneath the earth for centuries, the archaeologist Layard discovered in 1850 at Nineveh, an extensive collection of tablets or tiles of clay, covered with cuneiform characters, and representing some ten thousand distinct works or documents. The Assyrian monarch Sardanapalus, a great patron of letters, was the collector of this primitive and curious library of clay.
"The more perfect the illusion, the hollower the artificiality. Of course, no one could take Sardanapalus seriously, any more than if he were a marionette pulled by strings instead of the sort of live marionette he really is. But where the acting and the situations are so perfect, as you say, as to cause real emotion, the unreality of the whole business is more flagrantly conspicuous than ever.
And could not Jupiter have found a means to bring into the world Hercules and Lycurgus, if he had not also made for us Sardanapalus and Phalaris? It is now time for them to say that the consumption was made for the sound constitution of men's bodies, and the gout for the swiftness of their feet; and that Achilles would not have had a good head of hair if Thersites had not been bald.
His visage and port seemed to declare his character: dark overhanging brows; eyes that had the gleam of lightning; a savage mouth; an immense head; the voice of a Stentor. Madame Roland pictured him as a fiercer Sardanapalus. Artists called him Jove the Thunderer. His enemies saw in him the Satan of the Paradise Lost.
Had he known what the future held, possibly he might have imitated that apotheosis of vulgarity in which Sardanapalus eclipsed himself, but never could he have died with the good breeding and philosophy of Cato, for neither good breeding nor philosophy was in him.
How hard was the bondage to which he subjected his subjects! How different was his ordinary life from that of his illustrious father, with no repentance, no remorse, no self-abasement! He was a Nebuchadnezzar and a Sardanapalus combined, going from bad to worse.
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