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virtue, its scarce and partial manifestations were not sufficient to outweigh the large amount of general enjoyment, even if they entered at all into his conception of general prosperity; and with him there was nothing better for us than an exactly kept social order, where the average man without any high exercise of virtue could provide himself with abundance of externals. It is the more clear that this was his meaning from the one exception which he specifies to this general happiness; the only persons of whom any more was demanded, whose courage was exposed to trial, and who had more to bear than to enjoy, being the persecuted members of the Christian Church.

For the rest, an atheism disguising itself under the name of conformity with ancient usage, with a steady belief in this world, and in such good things as it had to offer, being the spiritual characteristics of the time, the temporary issue of so prudent a faith was, as might have been expected, profound peace (the condition which on the whole to enlightened atheism will always appear the most desirable); to liberty, to patriotism, to selfrespect, an indifference, if not hostility, such vast feelings being so often occasions of turbulence, and interfering with the general comfort; and a toleration of every religion, except Christianity. Christianity being excepted because it was itself intolerant-because, of all the religions, it was the only one really antagonistic to all this baseness, and with a spirit to face it and to execrate it.

In this condition of things arose the first European novel; the form of fiction properly belonging to periods of this kind, offering, as it does, the kind of intellectual enjoyment, which minds cultivated to such a degree of strength, and in such a belief, are capable of receiving. A novel, witty after its sort, filthy exceedingly, full of light good-natured satire, at times with touches of genuine humour, with its episodes of tragedy and comedy, and, if we may believe the Catholic Fathers, and the present translator, not without a transcendental philosophy, with which the pseudo-earnestness of such times supplies the absence of anything better. There is a half scorn of the life which it depicts, just so much as to show that the writer did see how base it was; but on the whole, his disposition was to be goodhumoured about it; to take the world as it came, and men as he found them; not to get on stilts and take to idealizing, but to make the best of things, and extract a laugh out of them, if nothing else.

The period and circumstances,' writes the translator, under which Apuleius composed his Metamorphoses, are not known with precision, neither has it been ascertained when he himself flourished, farther than that he is supposed to have been about

contemporary with Lucian, in the beginning of the second century. It is at all events generally admitted, that he was born of good family, at Madauna, a town in Numidia; received the first rudiments of education at Carthage, thence proceeded to Athens to complete his studies, and afterwards set out on his travels through Italy, Greece, and Asia.

'There is, however, one romantic event recorded to have happened to him, that possibly may have influenced his mind with reference to the composition of the Metamorphoses-while on his way to Alexandria, he happened to fall sick at Tripoli, where his protracted visit in the house of a young man, his host, led to a matrimonial alliance with the young man's mother, a lady of large independent fortune, named Pudentilla, who had at that time been fourteen years a widow. Soon after the marriage was solemnized, the family of the lady, who, as well as she herself, appear to have been captivated at first with Apuleius's wit and learning, and to have anxiously promoted the alliance, joined all together in a conspiracy to dissolve the connexion, in order to prevent the alienation of Pudentilla's property. Accordingly, they resolved to accuse Apuleius of the crime of witchcraft, on the ground that he had won the lady's heart by means of spells and incantations, on which ridiculous charge, sustained on proofs the most absurd and frivolous, he was arraigned with all the due formalities of law, and the cause was actually tried at Sabrata, then a Roman colony, before Claudius Maximus, the Proconsul. On that occasion, Apuleius pronounced in his defence the celebrated Apology, one of the principal of his works now extant, and defeated his antagonists triumphantly.'

But

It is supposed, that in his irritation at the foolery, from which he had suffered so much inconvenience, Apuleius wrote the 'Golden Ass' to revenge himself upon it. From the few facts which we know of his history, he certainly in places identifies himself with his hero. He would scarcely thank us to press the parallel through, however, or to suppose that he had any piece of private experience corresponding to its principal event. it is time that we should give some account of the story itself. A young gentleman, of philosophic family, sets out from Corinth on an expedition, which is to combine the useful and the amusing, into Thessaly. On his way he overtakes a pair of travellers, one of whom has been drawing heavily on the credulity of the other, and Lucius, whose appetite for the marvellous is strong, begs that he may be allowed to share the story, which at any rate will help the weariness of the long hill, which they were ascending. Learning that it concerned the doings of a witch, who could drag down the firmament, take the world upon her shoulders and walk away with it, freeze

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fountains, crumble the rocks, raise the dead, dethrone the gods, extinguish the stars, and illuminate the depths of Tartarus,' he philosophically rebukes the incredulous sceptic who dared to question the likelihood of the existence of such a creature, by declaring that we were not to disbelieve a thing because it was wonderful; that many wonderful things happened in this world which we could not explain, &c.; and that he had himself seen a sword-swallower at Athens take a hunting spear down his throat, and a little imp climb to the top of the haft, and twist and twine upon it as if he had never a bone in his body.' He begs the story-teller, therefore, to proceed. The latter, a commercial traveller in the cheese trade, by name Aristomenes, thus encouraged, goes on to say how he had lately been at Hypata, the city to which our hero was bound, where he had met with an acquaintance, one Socrates, in a state of great misery. On inquiring how he had sunk into so sad a condition, he learnt that his friend had fallen in with robbers, who had stripped him of all that he had, and had turned him out naked; while in this forlorn plight, a certain witch had, by bad luck, cast her eye upon him; the previous doings of which lady had been enough to make adventurous young persons hesitate in accepting her attentions.

"Listen!" Socrates had said to him, "and hear the arts which she hath perpetrated in broad daylight, before many witnesses. In the first place, by pronouncing a single word, she changed one of her lovers, of whom she was jealous, into a wild beaver, and exposed him to the hunters, as a punishment for his slight of her. Then again, she had a grudge against a neighbouring innkeeper, for nothing more, forsooth, than that he was one of her own profession. Him she transformed into a frog. Poor fellow! he is now grown old; and hoarsely croaking, as it were, in the way of business to his old customers, sometimes sits buried in the dregs of his own wine, and at other times, swims on the surface. Then there was a lawyer of the Forum who conducted a cause against her, and she changed him into a ram. So the lawyer still pleads his causes with his head, and gives rebutters and surrebutters as he used to do. Finally, there was the wife of one of her lovers, a chatterbox, who spoke scandal of her; and happening to be then about to increase her family, she condemned her to remain ever after in the same condition. Accordingly, 'tis now eight years, people say, she has been continually growing larger and larger, as if going to be brought to bed of an elephant."'

Socrates, however, in spite of all, and feeling it probably as dangerous to reject as to accept the lady's smiles, had surrendered to his destiny; but, poor wretch, not having been able to keep his own counsel, he was to be another instance of his witch mistress's cruelty and ingratitude. The same night, after supper,

where Aristomenes had been entertaining him, the door was crashed open, the bed was upset by the shock, and the cheesedealer, looking out half-smothered from under the clothes, saw the old woman enter with a companion, and there and then cut the throat (of course only after a witch-like symbolic manner) of her too talkative lover. The next morning they had recovered themselves, and supposed it was no more than a dream; but the symbol proved as effective as the reality, for in the course of the day, in crossing a river, poor Socrates fell down and died.

With his mind well filled with such ghastly stories, Lucius arrives shortly at this fearful city, nothing daunted, and full of eagerness to make personal acquaintance with such marvellous matters. He presents his letters of introduction, and is invited to stay at the house of an old usurer, by name Milo, whose wife, Pamphila, as it afterwards proved, was nothing less than the most ill-favoured, yet most exigeant, and at the same time most potent witch in Thessaly. The ugliness of the mistress was in some degree compensated for, however, by the prettiness of her maid, whom Lucius rapidly attaches to himself; and through Fotis, so the damsel was called, who was in the secret of her mistress, the unfortunate youth anticipates a full admission into the most attractive mysteries, without risk or discomfort to himself. Alas for the miscalculations of too curious mortals! But for the mischance which was to fall upon him-the saddest and most ignominious in which the destinies could involve any human being-he had first humanly to qualify himself. A few days after his arrival was to be celebrated, at Hypata, the festival of the god of laughter, toward which all strangers, actively or passively, according to their gifts, were expected to contribute something. Lucius, whose talents did not lie in the line of making fun, was forced to be the object of it; and to the incident which followed, the most humorous in the book, Cervantes seems to have been indebted for Don Quixote's adventure with the wine skins. Sir George Head says it is meant for a satire on the Pudentilla business; but it may very fairly rest upon its own merits.

On the eve of the feast, Lucius, returning home late, not over sober, from a supper party, perceived, on his arrival at his host's door, what he supposed to be three desperate robbers, in the act of breaking it open. In a paroxysm of drunken valour he draws his dagger, rushes among them, and dealing blows right and left, in a few moments lays them all three at his feet. Not a little surprised at his easy victory, and, moreover, dreadfully frightened at it, he lets himself in with his pass-key, hurries to his room, and locking the door, buries himself and his troubles under the bedclothes. After a miserable night, he is roused in the morning by the police coming to take him before the prefect,

to answer for the murder of three honest and peaceful citizens. The court is crowded by the entire population of Hypata-the bodies laid out covered with a black cloth-the mourning relations demanding justice. The evidence of the police is conclusive, the case is clear, the conviction inevitable; and Lucius, despite his protestations, is sentenced to instant execution. Before being taken to the cross, however, the first part of his sentence is that he must, with his own hand, uncover the bodies of his victims in the face of the multitude. Unwillingly he approaches the bier, drags off the pall, and, to his own utter perplexity, amidst shrieks and peals of laughter, he discloses not three murdered men, but three badly wounded goatskins, bearing witness in several large gaping orifices against the dagger of their assassin.

So amidst laughter and apologies, protestation that he is the hero of the day, and promises of a statue to commemorate his achievements, the court breaks up, and Lucius slinks home by the back streets to escape the mocking finger of the populace. No sooner has he arrived there, than the unfortunate Fotis flies to him, whip in hand, and presenting her person to his chastisement, prays him to inflict the punishment she had deserved by having been the unwilling cause of his disgrace. Now comes the point of the story, which is explained without a whipping, amidst tears and kisses. The creatures which had been stabbed, whatever they were, had been palpably engaged in breaking open the door, that was certain, and yet the next day they were no more than three dried goatskins, and he, poor fellow, had made sport for the god of laughter. But what might not happen in the witch land of Thessaly? The good-for-nothing Pamphila had set her heart for the time being on a certain youthful Boeotian. She had pressed heaven and earth into her service to bring about a return of her affection; and nothing had been wanting to complete the incantation which was to summon him but the universal ingredient in such composition-a lock of the victim's hair. For this precious prize the impatient Pamphila, who had watched her lover to the barber's, had despatched her domestic, who was to sweep it up from among the clippings on the floor. But the barber, who had got an inkling of her errand, detected her before she could make her escape with it; spite of struggle and entreaty, he tore it out of her hands and drove her out of his shop. What was to be done? a mistress who could put the stars out was not to be trifled with. She had thought of running away, she told Lucius; but the remembrance of him had prevented her from doing that, and she was dismally wending her way home, when passing through a back street, she perceived a man dressing some goat-skin wine

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