“Thou droll knave!” cried Zephoranim at last, dashing away the drops his merriment had brought into his eyes—­“Wilt kill me with thy bitter-mouthed jests? ... of a truth my sides ache at thee!  What ails thee now? ...  Come,—­we will have patience, if so be our mirth can be restrained,—­speak!—­what flaw canst thou find in our Sah-luma’s pearl of poesy?—­what spots on the sun of his divine inspiration?  As the Serpent lives, thou art an excellent mountebank and well deservest thy master’s pay!”

He laughed again,—­but Zabastes seemed in nowise disconcerted.  His withered countenance appeared to harden itself into lines of impenetrable obstinacy,—­tucking his long staff under his arm he put his fingers together in the manner of one who inwardly counts up certain numbers, and with a preparatory smack of his lips he began:  “Free speech being permitted to me, O most mighty Zephoranim, I would in the first place say that the poem so greatly admired by your Majesty, is totally devoid of common sense.  It is purely a caprice of the imagination,—­and what is imagination?  A mere aberration of the cerebral nerves,—­a morbidity of brain in which the thoughts brood on the impossible, —­on things that have never been, and never will be.  Thus, Sah-luma’s verse resembles the incoherent ravings of a moon-struck madman,—­moreover, it hath a prevailing tone of forced sublimity...” here Theos gave an involuntary start,—­then, recollecting where he was, resumed his passive attitude—­“which is in every way distasteful to the ears that love plain language.  For instance, what warrant is there for this most foolish line: 

     “‘The solemn chanting of the midnight stars.’

’Tis vile, ’tis vile! for who ever heard the midnight stars or any other stars chant? ... who can prove that the heavenly bodies are given to the study of music?  Hath Sah-luma been present at their singing lesson?” Here the old critic chuckled, and warming with his subject, advanced a step nearer to the throne as he went on:  “Hear yet another jarring simile: 

     “‘The wild winds moan for pity of the world.’

Was ever a more indiscreet lie?  A brazen lie!—­for the tales of shipwreck sufficiently prove the pitilessness of winds,—­and however much a verse-weaver may pretend to be in the confidence of Nature, he is after all but the dupe of his own frenetic dreams.  One couplet hath most discordantly annoyed my senses—­’tis the veriest doggerel: 

     “’The sun with amorous clutch
      Tears off the emerald girdle of the rose!’

O monstrous piece of extravagance!—­for how can the Sun (his Deity set apart) ‘clutch’ without hands?—­and as for ’the emerald girdle of the rose’—­I know not what it means, unless Sah-luma considers the green calyx of the flower a ‘girdle,’ in which case his wits must be far gone, for no shape of girdle can any sane man descry in the common natural protection of a bud before it blooms!  There was a phrase too concerning nightingales,—­and the gods know we have heard enough and too much of those over-praised birds! ...”  Here he was interrupted by one of his frequent attacks of coughing, and again the laughter of the whole court broke forth in joyous echoes.