The fire spread among the palaces and other magnificent edifices of that part of the city, and one of the great buildings in which the library was stored was reached and destroyed.

There was no other such collection in the world; and the consequence of this calamity has been, that it is only detached and insulated fragments of ancient literature and science that have come down to our times.

The world will never cease to mourn the irreparable loss.
[Sidenote: Caesar returns to Rome.] Notwithstanding the various untoward incidents which attended the war in Alexandria during its progress, Caesar, as usual, conquered in the end.
The young king Ptolemy was defeated, and, in attempting to make his escape across a branch of the Nile, he was drowned.

Caesar then finally settled the kingdom upon Cleopatra and a younger brother, and, after remaining for some time longer in Egypt, he set out on his return to Rome.
[Illustration: Cleopatra's Barge] [Sidenote: Subsequent adventures of Cleopatra.] The subsequent adventures of Cleopatra were as romantic as to have given her name a very wide celebrity.

The lives of the virtuous pass smoothly and happily away, but the tale, when told to others, possesses but little interest or attraction; while those of the wicked, whose days are spent in wretchedness and despair, and are thus full of misery to the actors themselves, afford to the rest of mankind a high degree of pleasure, from the dramatic interest of the story.
[Sidenote: Her splendid barge.] [Sidenote: Anthony and Octavius.] [Sidenote: Death of Cleopatra.] Cleopatra led a life of splendid sin, and, of course, of splendid misery.