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.