He advises with his daughter Minerva about the expediency of calling a council of the gods. Minerva suggests that perhaps the ignoring policy is the best in the premises. However, the upshot is that Mercury is to summon the gods. Our extract does not enter into the discussion of the merits of the question, but confines itself to the amusing preliminaries of the occasion:

Mercury. O yes, O yes! the gods are to come to council immediately! No delay-all to be present-come, come! upon urgent affairs of state. Jupiter. What! do you summon them in that bald, inartificial, prosaic fashion, Mercury-and on a business of such high importance? Mer. Why, how would you have it done, then?

Jup. How would I have it done? I say, proclamation should be made in dignified style-in verse of some kind, and with a sort of poetical grandeur. They would be more likely to come.

Mer. Possibly. But that's the business of your epic poets and rhapsodists-I'm not at all poetical myself. I should infallibly spoil the job, by putting in a foot too much or a foot too little, and only get myself laughed at for my bungling poetry. I hear even Apollo himself ridiculed for some of his poetical oracles—though in his case obscurity covers a multitude of sins. Those who consult him have so much to do to make out his meaning that they haven't much leisure to criticise his verse. Jup. Well, but, Mercury, mix up a little Homer in your summonsthe form, you know, in which he used to call us together; you surely remember it.

Mer. Not very readily or clearly.

However, I'll try:

"Now, all ye female gods and all ye male,

And all ye streams within old Ocean's pale,

And all ye nymphs, at Jove's high summons, come,

All ye who eat the sacred hecatomb!

Who sit and sniff the holy steam, come all,

Great names, and small names, and no names at all."

Jup. Well done, Mercury! a most admirable proclamation. Here they are all coming already. Now take and seat them, each in the order of their dignity-according to their material or their workmanship; the golden ones in the first seats, the silver next to them; then in succession those of ivory, brass, and stone-and of these, let the works of Phidias, and Alcam'enes, and My'ron, and Euphra'nor, and such-like artists, take

precedence; but let the rude and inartistic figures be pushed into some corner or other, just to fill up the meeting-and let them hold their tongues.

Mer. So be it; they shall be seated according to their degree. But it may be as well for me to understand—supposing one be of gold, weighing ever so many talents, but not well executed, and altogether common and badly finished, is he to sit above the brazen statues of Myron and Polycli'tus, or the marble of Phidias and Alcamenes? Or must I count the art as more worthy than the material?

Jup. It ought to be so, certainly; but we must give the gold the preference, all the same.

Mer. I understand. You would have me class them according to wealth, not according to merit or excellence. Now, then, you that are made of gold, here-in the first seats. (Turning to Jupiter.) It seems to me, your majesty, that the first places will be filled up entirely with barbarians. You see what the Greeks are—very graceful and beautiful, and of admirable workmanship, but of marble or brass, all of them, or even the most valuable, of ivory, with just a little gold to give them color and brightness; while their interior is of wood, with probably a whole commonwealth of mice established inside them. Whereas that Bendis, and Anu'bis, and At'this there, and Men, are of solid gold, and really of enormous value.

Neptune, (coming forward.) And is this fair, Mercury, that this dogfaced monster from Egypt should sit above me-me-Neptune?

Mer. That's the rule. Because, my friend Earth-shaker, Lysip'pus made you of brass, and consequently poor-the Corinthians having no gold at that time; whereas that is the most valuable of all metals. You must make up your mind, therefore, to make room for him, and not be vexed about it; a god with a great gold nose like that must needs take precedence.

(Enter VENUS.)—Ven., (coaxingly to Mercury.) Now, then, Mercury dear, take and put me in a good place, please; I'm golden, you know.

Mer. Not at all, so far as I can see. Unless I'm very blind, you're cut out of white marble-from Pentel'icus, I think-and it pleased Praxi'teles to make a Venus of you, and hand you over to the people of Cnidus.

Ven. But I can produce a most unimpeachable witness-Homer himself. He continually calls me "golden Venus" all through his poems. Mer. Yes; and the same authority calls Apollo "rich in gold" and "wealthy;" but you can see him sitting down there among the ordinary gods. He was stripped of his golden crown, you see, by the thieves,

and they even stole the strings of his lyre. So you may think yourself well off that I don't put you down quite among the crowd.

(Enter the COLOSSUS of RHODES) [Rōdz].—Col. Now, who will venture to dispute precedence with me-me, who am the sun, and of such a size to boot? If it had not been that the good people of Rhodes determined to construct me of extraordinary dimensions, they could have made sixteen golden gods for the same price. Therefore I must be ranked higher, by the rule of proportion. Besides, look at the art and the workmanship, so correct, though on such an immense scale.

Mer. What's to be done, Jupiter? It's a very hard question for me to decide. If I look at his material, he's only brass; but if I calculate how many talents' weight of brass he has in him, he's worth the most money of them all.

Jup. (testily.) What the deuce does he want here at all-dwarfing all the rest of us into insignificance, as he does, and blocking up the meeting besides? (Aloud to Colossus.) Hark ye, good cousin of Rhodes, though you may be worth more than all these golden gods, how can you possibly take the highest seat, unless they all get up and you sit down by yourself? Why, one of your thighs would take up all the seats in the Pnyx! You'd better stand up, if you please, and you can stoop your head a little toward the company.

Mer. Here's another difficulty, again. Here are two, both of brass, and of the same workmanship, both from the hands of Lysippus, and, more than all, equal in point of birth, both being sons of JupiterBacchus, here, and Hercules. Which of them is to sit first? They're quarreling over it, as you see.

Jup. We're wasting time, Mercury, when we ought to have begun business long ago. So let them sit down anyhow now, as they please. We will have another meeting hereafter about this question, and then I shall know better what regulations to make about precedence.

Mer. But, good heavens! what a row they all make, shouting that perpetual cry, as they do, "Divide, 'vide, 'vide the victims!" Where's the nectar? where's the nectar?" The ambrosia's all out! the ambrosia's all out!" "Where are the hecatombs? where are the hecatombs ?" "Give us our share!"

Jup. Bid them hold their tongues, do, Mercury, that they may hear the object of the meeting, and let such nonsense alone.

Mer. But they don't all understand Greek, and I am no such universal linguist as to make proclamation in Scythian, and Persian, and Thracian, and Celtic. It will be best, I suppose, to make a motion with my hand for them to be silent.

66

Jup. Very well-do.

Mer. See, they're all as dumb as philosophers. Now's your time to they're all looking at you, waiting to hear what

speak. Do you see

you're going to say.

Jup. (clearing his throat.) Well, as you're my own son, Mercury, I don't mind telling you how I feel. You know how self-possessed and how eloquent I always am at public meetings?

Mer. I know I trembled whenever I heard you speak, especially when you used to threaten all that about wrenching up earth and sea from their foundations, you know, gods and all, and dangling that golden chain.

Jup. (interrupting him.) But now, my son-I can't tell whether it's the importance of the subject, or the vastness of the assembly (there are a tremendous lot of gods here, you see)—my ideas seem all in a whirl, and a sort of trembling has come over me, and my tongue seems as though it were tied. And the most unlucky thing of all is, I've forgotten the opening paragraph of my speech, which I had all ready prepared beforehand, that my exordium might be as attractive as possible.

Mer. Well, my good sir, you are in a bad way. They all mistrust your silence, and fancy they are to hear something very terrible, and that this is what makes you hesitate.

Jup. Suppose, Mercury, I were to rhapsodize a little-that introduction, you know, out of Homer?

Mer. Which?

Jup. (declaiming)—

"Now, hear my words, ye gods and she-gods all—”

Mer. No-heaven forbid ! you've given us enough of that stuff already. No-pray let that hackneyed style alone. Rather give them a bit out of one of the Philippics of Demosthenes-any one you please; you can alter and adapt it a little. That's the plan most of our modern orators adopt.

The preceding extract from Lucian must answer here for exemplification of that author's quality and method. His Dialogues of the Dead" are highly interesting, conceived and executed in much the same bantering spirit. We greatly wish we could find room for further citations. But there is so much beyond, forewarning us of space to be demanded, that we must perforce forbear. Whether any true earnestness of moral purpose underlay Lucian's exquisite, though

༈!

rollicking, mockery, is a point not easy to decide. It is gravely to be feared that he was but a voice of a skeptical age, irreverent toward Olympianism, not because Olympianism was a lie, but because it was capable of being made to appear a ridiculous lie. Alas, must we say, then? alas, poor Lucian! For light had in his time come into the world, and he lived within the shining of it.

Passing by the bits of natural history, such as natural history was to the Greeks, anecdotical and marvelous, rather than philosophical and scientific, passing by too the fragments of mythology, together with all the rest of the miscellaneous matter that goes to make up the spice and variety of a good Greek Reader, let us recover ourselves from the sadness of our concluding reflection about poor laughing Lucian, by introducing here a few drolleries which must be anonymous, and so forward to our next chapter, a long one, but not too long, our readers will certainly say, for it deals with Xenophon's "Anabasis."

The following humors will serve to show how old some jests still current are. Irish bulls are famous, but what better Irish bulls are there than some of these from Greece? And these, who knows? may be importations to Greece from Egypt.

We adopt, with slight change, a translation that comes to hand, stiffly literal, but scholarly enough, however bare of elegance:

A simpleton, wishing to swim, was nearly strangled in the attempt. He swore, therefore, "he would not touch the water again before he had learned to swim."

A simpleton, wishing to teach his horse not to eat much, gave him no food. And when the horse died with hunger he said, "I have sustained a great loss, for when he learned not to eat, then he died."

A simpleton, learning that a raven would live two hundred years, bought a raven and fed it, by way of an experiment..