Essays in Rebellion

XXVII

Mr. Clarkson, of the Education Office, was enjoying his breakfast with his accustomed equanimity and leisure. Having skimmed the Literary Supplement of the Times, and recalled a phrase from a symphony on his piano, he began opening his letters. But at the third he paused in sudden perplexity, holding his coffee-cup half raised. After a while the brightness of adventurous decision came into his eyes, and he set the cup down, almost too violently, on the saucer.

"I'll do it!" he cried, with the resolute air of an explorer contemplating the Antarctic. "The world is too much with me. I will recover my true personality in the wilderness. I will commune with my own heart and be still!"

He rang the bell hurriedly, lest his purpose should weaken.

"Oh, Mrs. Wilson," he said carelessly, "I am going away for a few days."

"Visiting at some gentleman's seat to shoot the gamebirds, I make no doubt," answered the landlady.

"Why, no; not precisely that," said Mr. Clarkson. "The fact is, Mr. Davies, a literary friend of mine—quite the best authority on Jacobean verse—offers me his house, just by way of a joke. The house will be empty, and he says he only wants me to defend his notes on the History of the Masque from burglary. I shall take him at his word."

"You alone in a house, sir? There's a thing!" exclaimed the landlady.

"A thing to be thankful for," Mr. Clarkson replied. "George Sand always longed to inhabit an empty house."

"Mr. Sand's neither here nor there," answered the landlady firmly. "But you're not fit, sir, begging your pardon. Unless a person comes in the morning to do for you."

"I shall prefer complete solitude," said Mr. Clarkson. "The calm of the uninterrupted morning has for me the greatest attraction."

"You'll excuse me mentioning such things," she continued, "but there's the washing-up and bed-making."

"Excellent athletic exercises!" cried Mr. Clarkson. "In Xenophon's charming picture of married life we see the model husband instructing the young wife to leave off painting and adorning herself, and to seek the true beauty of health and strength by housework and turning beds."

"There's many on us had ought to be beauties, then, without paint nor yet powder," said the landlady, turning away with a little sigh. And when Mr. Clarkson drove off that evening with his bag, she stood by the railings and said to the lady next door: "There goes my gentleman, and him no more fit to do for hisself than a babe unborn, and no more idea of cooking than a crocodile!"

The question of cooking did not occur to Mr. Clarkson till he had entered the semi-detached suburban residence with his friend's latchkey, groped about for the electric lights, and discovered there was nothing to eat in the house, whereas he was accustomed to a biscuit or two and a little whisky and soda before going to bed.

"Never mind," he thought. "Enterprise implies sacrifice, and hunger will be a new experience. I can buy something for breakfast in the morning."

So he spent a placid hour in reading the titles of his friend's books, and then retired to the bedroom prepared for him.

He woke in the morning with a sense of profound tranquillity, and thought with admiration of the Dean of his College, whose one rule of life was never to allow anyone to call him. "This is worth a little subsequent trouble, if, indeed, trouble is involved," he murmured to himself, as he turned over and settled down to sleep again. But hardly had he dozed off when he was startled by an aggressive double-knock at the front door. He hoped it would not recur; but it did recur, and was accompanied by prolonged ringing of an electric bell. Feeling that his peace was broken, he put on his slippers and crept downstairs.

"What do you want?" he said at the door.

"Post," came a voice. Undoing the bolts, he put out a naked arm. "Even if you are the post," he remarked, "you need not sound the Last Trumpet!"

"Davies," said the postman, crammed a bundle of proofs into the expectant hand, and departed.

Mr. Clarkson turned into the kitchen. It presented a rather dreary aspect. The range and fire-irons looked as though they had been out all night. The grate was piled with ashes, like a crater.

"No wonder," said Mr. Clarkson, "that ashes are the popular comparison for a heart of extinguished affections. Could anything be more desolate, more hopeless, or, I may say, more disagreeable? To how many a disappointed cook that simile must come home when first she gets down in the morning!"

He took the poker and began raking gently between the bars. But no matter how tenderly he raked, his hands appeared to grow black of themselves, and great clouds of dust floated about the room and covered him.

"This must be the way to do it," he said, pausing in perplexity; "I suppose a certain amount of dirt is inevitable when you are grappling with reality. But my pyjamas will be in a filthy state."

Taking them off, he hung them on the banisters, and, with a passing thought of Lady Godiva, closed the kitchen door and advanced again towards the grate, still grasping the poker in his hand. Then he set himself to grapple with reality in earnest. The ashes crashed together, dust rose in columns, iron rang on iron, as in war's smithy. But little by little the victory was achieved, and lines of paper, wood, and coal gave promise of brighter things. He wiped his sweating brow, tingeing it with a still deeper black, and, catching sight of himself in a servant's looking-glass over the mantelpiece, he said, "There is no doubt man was intended by nature to be a coloured race."

But while he was thinking what wisdom the Vestal Virgins showed in never letting their fire go out, another crash came at the door, followed by the war-whoop of a scalp-hunter. "I seem to recognise that noise," he thought, "but I can't possibly open the door in this condition."

Creeping down the passage, he said "Who's there?" through the letter-box.

"Milko!" came the repeated yell.

"Would there be any objection to your depositing the milk upon the doorstep?" asked Mr. Clarkson.

"Righto!" came the answer, and steps retreated with a clang of pails.

"Why do the common people love to add 'o' to their words?" Mr. Clarkson reflected. "Is it that they unconsciously appreciate 'o' as the most beautiful of vowel sounds? But I wonder whether I ought to have blacked that range before I lighted the fire? The ironwork certainly looks rather pre-Dreadnought! What I require most just now is a hot bath, and I'd soon have one if I only knew which of these little slides to pull out. But if I pulled out the wrong one, there might be an explosion, and then what would become of the History of the Masque?"

So he put on a kettle, and waited uneasily for it to sing as a kettle should. "Now I'll shave," he said; "and when I am less like that too conscientious Othello, I'll go out and buy something for breakfast."

The bath was distinctly cool, but when he got out there was a satisfaction in the water's hue, and, though chilled to the bone, he carried his pyjamas upstairs with a feeling of something accomplished. On entering his bedroom, he was confronted by his disordered pillow, and a bed like a map of Switzerland in high relief. "Courage!" he cried, "I will make it at once. The secret of labour-saving is organisation."

"I know what that is," he said. "That's called flue, and it must be removed. Swift advised the chambermaid, if she was in haste, to sweep the dust into a corner of the room, but leave her brush upon it, that it might not be seen, for that would disgrace her. Well, there is no one to see me, so I must do it as I can."

He crawled under the bed, and gathering the flue together in his two hands, began throwing it out of the window. "Pity it isn't nesting season for the birds," he said, as he watched it float away. But this process was too slow; so taking his towel, he dusted the drawers, the washing-stand, and the greater part of the floor, shaking the towel out of the window, until, in his eagerness, he dropped it into the back garden, and it lay extended upon the wash-house roof.

Tranquillity had now vanished, and solitude was losing some of its charm. It was quite time he started for the office, but he had not begun to dress, and, except for the kettle, which he could hear boiling over downstairs, there was not a gleam of breakfast. After washing again, he put on his clothes hurriedly, and determined to postpone the remainder of his physical exercise till his return in the evening.

Running downstairs, he saw his dirty boots staring him in the face. "Is there any peace in ever climbing up the climbing wave?" he quoted, with a sinking heart. There was no help for it. The things had to be cleaned, or people would wonder where he had been. Searching in a cupboard full of oily rags, grimy leathers, and other filthy instruments, he found the blacking and the brushes, and presently the boots began to shine in patches here and there. Then he washed again, and as he flung open the front door, he kicked the milk all down the steps. It ran in a broad, white stream along the tiled pavement to the gate.

"There goes breakfast!" he thought, but the disaster reached further. Hastily fetching a pail of water, he soused it over the steps, with the result that all the whitening came off and mingled with the milk upon the tiles. A second pail only heightened the deplorable aspect, and he splashed large quantities of the water over his trousers and boots. He felt it running through his socks. It was impossible to go to the office like that, or to leave his friend's house in such a state.

He took off his coat and began pushing the milky water to and fro with a broom. Seeing the maid next door making great wet curves on her steps with a sort of stone, he called to her to ask how she did it.

"Same as other people, saucy," she retorted at once.

"Is that a bath-brick you are manipulating?" Mr. Clarkson asked.

"Bath-brick, indeed! What do you take me for?" she replied, and continued swirling the stuff round and round.

After a further search in the cupboard, Mr. Clarkson discovered a similar piece of stone, and stooping down, began to swirl it about in the same manner. The stuff was deposited in yellowish curves, which he believed would turn white. But it showed the marks so obviously that, to break up the outlines, he carefully dabbed the steps all over with the flat of his hands. "The effect will be like an Academician's stippling," he thought, but when he had swept the surface of the garden path into the road, he scrutinised his handiwork with some satisfaction.

Hardly had he cleaned his boots again, washed again, and changed his socks, when there came another knocking at the door, polite and important this time. He found a well-dressed man, with tall hat, frock-coat, and umbrella, who inquired if he could speak to the proprietor.

"Mr. Davies is away," said Mr. Clarkson, fixing his eyes on the stranger's boots. "I beg your pardon, but may I remind you that you are standing on my steps? I'm afraid you will whiten the soles of your boots, I mean."

"Thank you, that's of no consequence," said the stranger, entering, and leaving two great brown footprints on the step and several white ones on the passage. "But I thought I might venture to submit to your consideration a pound of our unsurpassable tea."

"Tea?" cried Mr. Clarkson, with joyous eagerness. "I suppose you don't happen to have milk, sugar, bread and butter, and an egg or two concealed about your person, do you?"

"I am not a conjuror," said the stranger, resuming his hat with some hauteur.

An hour later, Mr. Clarkson was enjoying at his Club a meal that he endeavoured to regard as lunch, and on reaching the office in the afternoon he apologised for having been unavoidably detained at home.

"There's no place like home," replied his elderly colleague, with his usual inanity.

XXVIII

George Eliot warned us somewhere not to expect Isaiah and Plato in every country house, and the warning was characteristic of the time when one really might have met Ruskin or Herbert Spencer. How uncalled for it would be now! If Isaiah or Plato were to appear at any country house, what a shock it would give the company, even if no one present had heard of their names and death before! We do not know how prophets and philosophers would behave in a country house, but, to judge from their books, their conversation could not fail to embarrass. What would they say when the daughter of the house inquired if her Toy-Pom was not really rather a darling, or the host proclaimed to the world that he never took potatoes with fish? What would the host and daughter say if their guest began to prophesy or discuss the nature of justice? There is something irreligious in the incongruity of the scene.

The epigrammatist still lingers, and sometimes dines; but his roses have faded, and the weariness of his audience is no longer a pose. A tragic ghost, he feels like one who treads alone some banquet-hall, not, indeed, deserted, but filled with another company, and that is so much drearier. The faces that used to smile on him are gone, the present faces only stare and if he told them now that it may be better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, but both are good, they would conceal a shiver of boredom under politeness. It is recognised that life with an epigrammatist has become unendurable. "Witty?" (if one may quote again the Carlyle whom English people are forgetting) "O be not witty: none of us is bound to be witty under penalties. A fashionable wit? If you ask me which, he or a death's head, will be the cheerier company for me, pray send not him."

Nor does it arouse the evil passions of imparting information or contradicting opinions. When someone says, "It is a fine day," or "It's good weather for ducks," he does not wish to convey a new fact. I have known only one man who desired to contradict such statements, and, looking up at the sky, would have liked to order the sun in or out rather than agree; and he was a Territorial officer, so that command was in his nature. But mention the Lords, or the Church, or the Suffrage, and what a turmoil and tearing of hair! What sandstorms of information, what semi-courteous contradiction! Whither has the sweet gregariousness of human converse strayed? Black looks flash from the miracle of a seeing eye; bad blood rushes to thinking foreheads; the bonds of hell are loosed; pale gods sit trembling in their twilight. "O sons of Adam, the sun still shines, and a spell of fair weather never did no harm, as we heard tell on; but don't you think a drop of rain to-night would favour the roots? You'll excuse a farmer's grumbling."

People do not associate in order to receive epigrammatic shocks, nor to be fed up with information and have their views put right. They associate for society. They feel more secure, more open-hearted and cheerful, when together. Sheep know in their hearts that numbers are no protection against the dog, who is so much cleverer and more terrible than they; but still they like to keep in the flock. It is always comfortable to sit beside a man as foolish as oneself and hear him say that East is East and West is West; or that men are men, and women are women; or that the world is a small place after all, truth is stranger than fiction, listeners never hear any good of themselves, and a true friend is known in adversity. That gives the sense of perfect comradeship. There is here no tiresome rivalry of wits, no plaguy intellectual effort. One feels one's proper level at once, and needs no longer go scrambling up the heights with banners of strange devices. At such moments of pleasant and unadventurous intercourse, it will be found very soothing to reply that cold hands show a warm heart, that only town-dwellers really love the country, that night is darkest before the dawn, that there are always faults on both sides, that an Englishman's home is his castle, but travel expands the mind, and marriage is a lottery.

Such sentences, delivered alternately, will supply all the requisites of intercourse. The philosopher rightly esteemed no knowledge of value unless it was known already, and all these things have been known a very long time. Sometimes, it is true, a conversation may become more directly informative and yet remain amicable, as when the man on the steamer acquaints you with the facts that lettuce contains opium, that Lincoln's Inn Fields is the size of the Great Pyramid's base, that Mr. Gladstone took sixty bites to the mouthful, that hot tea is a cooling drink, that a Frenchwoman knows how to put on her clothes, that the engineer on board is sure to be a Scotsman, that fish is good for the brain because it contains phosphorus, that cheese will digest everything but itself, that there are more acres in England than words in the Bible, and that the cigars smoked in a year would go ten thousand and a quarter times round the earth if placed end to end. These facts are also familiar to everyone beforehand, and they present a solid basis for gregarious conversation. They put the merest stranger at his ease. They make one feel at home.

Some of the trades and professions secure the same object by special phrases. When you hear that the horses are fat as butter, the men keen as mustard, and everything right as rain, you know you are back to the army again. The kindly mention of the Great Lexicographer, the Wizard of the North, the Sage of Chelsea, and London's Particular calls up the vision of a street descending into the vale of St. Paul's. But such phrases are fleeting. They hardly last four generations of mankind, and already they wither to decay. "Every cloud has a silver lining," "It's a poor heart that never rejoices," "There are as good fish in the sea as ever were caught"—those are the observations that give stability and permanence to the intercourse of man. They are not clever; they contain no paradox; like the Ugly Duckling, they cannot emit sparks. But one's heart leaps up at hearing them, as at the sight of a rainbow. For, like the rainbow, they are an assurance that while the earth remaineth, seed-time and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall never cease.

XXIX

Except where the rock is too steep for growth, the slopes of the deep hollow are covered with trees and bushes on every side. But the trees are thickest where the slope falls most gently—so gently that from the foot of the crater to the water's edge the ground for a few hundred yards might almost be called a bit of plain. Under the trees there the best strawberries grow, and there stood the temple of mysterious and blood-stained rites. Prowling continually round and round one of the trees, the ghastly priest was for centuries there to be seen:

In the opening chapter, which states the central problem, still slowly being worked out in the great series of The Golden Bough, Dr. Frazer has drawn the well-known picture of that haunted man. "The dreamy blue," he writes:

In his investigations among the "sword-dancers" of Northern England, Mr. Cecil Sharp has discovered that at Earsdon, after the usual captain's song, a strange interlude occurs, in which two of the dancers feign a quarrel, and one is killed and carried out for burial amid the lamentations of the "Bessy." A travelled doctor, however, arrives, and calls to the dead man, "Jack! take a drop of my bottle, that'll go down your thrittle-throttle." Whereupon up jumps Jack and shakes his sword, and the dance proceeds amid the rejoicings of Bessy and the rest. So priest slays priest, the British Diana laments her hero slain, the British Aesculapius, in verse inferior to Euripides, tends him back to life, and who in that Northumbrian dance could fail to recognise a rite sprung from the same primitive worship as the myths of Nemi? But if one had been able to stand beside that murderous and apprehensive priest, and to foretell to him that in future centuries, long after his form of religion had died away, far off in Britain, beside the wall of the Empire's frontier, his tragedy would thus be burlesqued by Bessy, Jack, and the doctor, one may doubt if he would have expressed any kind of scientific interest, or have even smiled, as, sword in hand, he prowled around his sacred tree, peering on every side.

Why, then, did he do it? How came it that there was always a candidate for that bloody deed and disquieting existence? It is true that the competition for the post appears to have decreased with years. Originally, the priest's murder seems to have been an annual affair, regular as the "grotter" which we are called upon to remember every August in London streets, or as the Guy Faux, whose fires will in future ages be connected with autumnal myths or with the disappearance of Adonis or Thammuz yearly wounded. The virtues of fertility's god had to be renewed each spring; year by year the priest was slain; and only by a subsequent concession to human weakness was he allowed to retain his life till he could no longer defend it. The change seems to show that, as time went on, the privileges of the office were regarded with less eagerness, and it was more difficult to find one man a year anxious to be killed.

But with what motive, century after century, no matter at what interval of years, did a volunteer always come forward to slay and to be slain? Certainly, the priest had to be a runaway slave; but was Roman slavery so hideous that a life of unending terror by day and night was to be preferred—a life enslaved as a horse's chained to the grinding mill in a brickyard, and without the horse's hours of stabled peace? Hunger will drive to much, but even when the risky encounter with one's predecessor had been successfully accomplished, what enjoyment could there be in meals eaten in bitter haste, with one hand upon the sword? As to money, what should all the wealth of the shrine profit a man compelled, in Bishop Ken's language, to live each day as it were his last? Promise of future and eternal bliss? The religion held out no sure and certain hope of such a state. Joy in the divine service? It is not to vigorous runaway slaves that we look for ecstatic rapture in performing heaven's will. Upon the priest was bestowed the title of "King of the Wood." Can it be that for that barren honour a human being dyed his hands with murder and risked momentary assassination for the remainder of his lifetime? Well, we have heard of the Man who would be King, and empty titles still are sought by political services equally repellent.

But, for ourselves, in that forlorn and hag-ridden figure we more naturally see a symbol of the generations that slay the slayer and shall themselves be slain. It is thus that each generation comes knocking at the door—comes, rather, so suddenly and unannounced, clutching at the Tree of Life, and with the glittering sword of youth beating down its worn-out defenders. New blood, new thoughts and hopes each generation brings to resuscitate the genius of fertility and growth. Often it longs imperiously to summon a stalwart ruffian, who will finish off decrepitude and make an end; but hardly has the younger generation itself assumed the office and taken its stand as the Warder of the Tree, when its life and hopes in turn are threatened, and among the ambuscading woods it hears a footstep coming and sees the gleam of a drawn sword. Let us not think too precisely on such events. But rather let us climb the toilsome track up to the little town, where Cicero once waited to meet the assassin Brutus after the murder of the world's greatest man; and there, in the ancient inn still called "Diana's Looking-glass" from the old name of the beautiful and mysterious lake which lies in profoundly mingled green and indigo below it, let us forget impending doom over a twopenny quart of wine and a plate of little cuttlefish stewed in garlic, after which any priest might confront his successor with equanimity.

XXX

Sometimes, for a moment, the curtain of the past is rolled up, the seven seals of its book are loosened, and we are allowed to know more of the history than the round number of soldiers with which a general crossed a river, or the succession that brought one crazy voluptuary to follow another upon the Imperial throne. We do not refuse gratitude for what we ordinarily receive. To the general it made all the difference whether he had a thousand soldiers more or less, and to us it makes some. To the Imperial maniac it was of consequence that his predecessor in the government of civilised mankind was slain before him, and for us the information counts for something, too; just as one meets travellers who satisfy an artistic craving by enumerating the columns of a ruined shrine, and seeing that they agree with the guidebook. But it is not often that historians tell us what we really want to know, or that artists will stoop to our questionings. We would willingly go wrong over a thousand or two of those soldiers, if we might catch the language of just one of them as he waded into the river; and how many a simpering Venus would we grind into face-powder if we could follow for just one day the thoughts of a single priest who once guarded her temple! But, occupied with grandeur and beauty, the artists and historians move upon their own elevated plane, and it is only by furtive glimpses that we catch sight of the common and unclean underworld of life, always lumbering along with much the same chaotic noise of hungry desires and incessant labour, of animalism and spiritual aspiration.

One such glimpse we are given in that book of The Golden Ass, now issued by the Clarendon Press, in Mr. H.E. Butler's English version, but hitherto best known through a chapter in Walter Pater's Marius, or by William Adlington's sixteenth century rendering, included among The Tudor Translations. It is a strange and incoherent picture that the book presents. Pater well compares it to a dream: "Story within story—stories with the sudden, unlooked-for changes of dreams." And, as though to suit this dream-like inconsequence, the scene is laid in Thessaly, the natural home of witchcraft—where, in fact, I was myself laid under a witch's incantation little more than ten years ago, and might have been transformed into heaven knows what, if a remembered passage from this same book of Apuleius had not caused an outburst of laughter that broke the spell only just in time. It is a savage country, running into deep glens of forest and precipitous defiles among the mountains, fit haunt for the robber bands with which the few roads were infested. The region where the Lucius of the book wandered, either as man, or after his own curiosity into mysterious things had converted him into an ass (whereas he had wished to become a beautiful bird)—the region recalls some wild picture of Salvator Rosa's. We are surrounded by gloomy shades, sepulchral caverns, and trees writhing in storm, nor are cut-throat bandits ever far away. Violence and murder threaten at every turn. Through the narrow and filthy streets young noblemen, flown with wine, storm at midnight. When a robber chief is nailed through the hand to a door, his devoted followers hew off his arm and set him free. They capture girls for ransom, and sell them to panders. When one is troublesome, they propose to sew her up in the paunch of the yet living ass, and expose her to the mid-day sun. One of the gang, disguised as a bear, slays all his keepers, and is himself torn in pieces by men and dogs. All the band are finally slaughtered or flung from precipices. Gladiatorial beasts are kept as sepulchres for criminals. A slave is smeared with honey and slowly devoured by ants till only his white skeleton remains tied to a tree. A dragon eats one of the party, quite cursorily. What with bears, wolves, wild boars, and savage dogs, each step in life would seem a peril, were not the cruelty of man more perilous still. Continued existence in that region was, indeed, so insecure, that men and women in large numbers ended the torments of anxiety by cutting life short.

So life was a little trying, a little perplexing; but it afforded wide scope for curiosity, and Apuleius, an African, brought up in Athens, and living in Rome, was endlessly curious. In his attraction to horrors, to bloodshed, and the shudder of grisly phantoms there was, perhaps, something of the man of peace. It is only the unwarlike citizen who could delight in imagining a brigand nurtured from babyhood on human blood. He was, indeed, writing in the very period which the historian fixed upon as the happiest and most prosperous that the human race has ever enjoyed—those two or three benign generations when, under the Antonines, provincials combined with Romans in celebrating "the increasing splendours of the cities, the beautiful face of the country, cultivated and adorned like an immense garden, and the long festival of peace, which was enjoyed by so many nations, forgetful of their ancient animosities, and delivered from the apprehension of future danger." The slow and secret poison that Gibbon says was introduced by the long peace into the vitals of the Empire, was, perhaps, among the causes that turned the thoughts of Apuleius to scenes of violence and terror—to the "macabre," as Pater said—just as it touched his style with the preciosity of decadence, and prompted him to occupy a page with rapture over the "swift lightnings" flashed against the sunlight from women's hair. He was, in fact, writing for citizens much like the English of twenty years ago, when the interest of readers, protected from the harsh realities of danger and anxiety, was flattered equally by bloodthirsty slaughters, the shimmer of veiled radiance, and haunted byways for access to the unknown gods.

Those byways to unknown gods were much affected by Apuleius himself. The world was at the slack, waiting, as it were, for the next tide to flow, and seldom has religion been so powerless or religions so many. Of one abandoned woman it is told as the climax of her other wickednesses that she blasphemously proclaimed her belief in one god only. Apuleius seems to have been initiated into every cult of religious mystery, and in his story he exultingly shows us the dog-faced gods of Egypt triumphing on the soil that Apollo and Athene had blessed. Here was Anubis, their messenger, and unconquered Osiris, supreme father of gods, and another whose emblem no mortal tongue might expound. So it came that at the great procession of Isis through a Greek city the ass was at last able, after unutterable sufferings, to devour the chaplet of roses destined to restore him to human shape; and thereupon he took the vows of chastity and abstinence (so difficult for him to observe) until at length he was worthy to be initiated into the mysteries of the goddess, and, in his own words, "drew nigh to the confines of death, trod the threshold of Proserpine, was borne through all the elements, and returned to earth again, saw the sun gleaming with bright splendour at dead of night, approached the gods above and the gods below, and worshipped them face to face."

It was this redemption by roses, and the initiation into virtue's path, that caused Adlington in his introduction to call the book "a figure of man's life, egging mortal men forward from their asinal form to their human and perfect shape, that so they might take a pattern to regenerate their lives from brutish and beastly custom," And, indeed, the book is, in a wider sense, the figure of man's life, for almost alone among the writings of antiquity it reveals to us every phase of that dim underworld which persists, as we have supposed, almost unnoticed and unchanged from one generation of man to another, and takes little account either of government, the arts, or the other interests of intellectual classes. It is a world of incessant toil and primitive passion, yet laughter has place in it, and Apuleius shows us how two slave cooks could laugh as they peered through a chink at their ass carefully selecting the choicest dainties from the table; and how the whole populace of a country town roared with delight at the trial of a man who thought he had killed three thieves, but had really pierced three wine skins; and how the ass in his distress appealed unto Caesar for the rights of a Roman citizen, but could get no further with his best Greek than "O!" It is a world of violence and obscenity and laughter, but, above all, a world of pity. Virgil, too, was touched with the pity of mortal things, but towards the poor and the labouring man he rather affected a pastoral envy. Apuleius had looked poverty nearer in the eyes, and he knew the piteous terror on its face. To him we must turn if we would know how the poor lived in the happiest and most prosperous age that mankind has enjoyed. In the course of his adventures, the ass was sold to a mill—a great flour factory employing numerous hands—and, with his usual curiosity, he there observed, as he says, the way in which that loathsome workshop was conducted: