Say it.

SARDANAPALUS.

MYRRHA.

It is that no kind hand will gather

The dust of both into one urn.

SARDANAPALUS.

The better!

Rather let them be borne abroad upon
The winds of heaven, and scatter'd into air,
Than be polluted more by human hands
Of slaves and traitors; in this blazing palace,
And its enormous walls of reeking ruin.
We leave a nobler monument than Egypt
Hath piled in her brick mountains, o'er dead kings,
Or kine, for none know whether those proud piles
Be for their monarch, or their ox-god Apis:
So much for monuments that have forgotten
Their very record!

MYRRHA.

Then farewell, thou earth!
And loveliest spot of earth! farewell Ionia?
Be thou still free and beautiful, and far
Aloof from desolation! My last prayer

MYRRHA.

'Tis fired! I come.

[AS MYRRHA Springs forward to throw herself into the flames, the Curtain falls.

NOTES.

Note 1. Page 291, line 19.

And thou, my own Ionian Myrrha.

«The Jonian name had been still more comprehensive, having included the Achaians and the Baotians, who, together with those to whom it was afterwards confined, would make nearly the whole of the Greek nation, and among the orientals it was always the general name for the Greeks.»-Mitford's Greece, vol. i. p. 199.

Note 2. Page 294, line 1.
Sardanapalus,

The king, and son of Anacyndarases,

In one day built Anchialus and Tarsus.

Eat, drink, and love; the rest's not worth a fillip..

<< For this expedition he took not only a small chosen body of the phalanx, but all his light troops. In the first day's march he reached Anchialus, a town said to have been founded by the king of Assyria, Sardanapalus. The fortifications, in their magnitude and extent, still in Arrian's time, bore the character of greatness, which the Assyrians appear singularly to have affected in works of the kind. A monument representing Sardanapalus was found there, warranted by an inscription in Assyrian characters, of course in the old Assyrian language, which the Greeks, whether well or ill, interpreted thus: «Sardanapalus, son of Anacyndaraxes, in one day founded Anchialus and Tarsus. Eat, drink, play all other human joys are not worth a fillip.» Supposing this version nearly exact (for Arrian says it was not quite so), whether the purpose has not been to invite to civil order | a people disposed to turbulence, rather than to recommend immoderate luxury, may perhaps reasonably be

Was for thee, my last thoughts, save one, were of thee! questioned. What, indeed, could be the object of

And that?

SARDANAPALUS.

MYRRHA.

Is yours.

king of Assyria in founding such towns in a country so distant from his capital, and so divided from it by an immense extent of sandy deserts and lofty mountains, and, still more, how the inhabitants could be at once in

{The trumpet of PANIA sounds without. circumstances to abandon themselves to the intemperate,

SARDANAPALUS.

Hark!

MYRRHA.
Now!
SARDANAPALUS.

Adien, Assyria! I loved thee well, my own, my fathers' land, And better as my country than my kingdom.

joys which their prince has been supposed to have recommended, is not obvious; but it may deserve observation that, in that line of coast, the southern of Lesser Asia, ruius of cities, evidently of an age after Alexander, yet barely named in history, at this day astonish the adventurous traveller by their magnificence and elegance. Amid the desolation which, under a singularly barbarian government, has for so many centuries been daily spreading in the finest countries of the globe, whether

Other Senators, the council of Ten, Guards, Attend- Of Milan, and his sufferings half atone for