you now reclining; the delight of the fair, the learned, the witty,

and the brave? In that clear and tranquilclimate, whose air
breathes of "violet and lily, myrtle, and the flower of the vine,"

Where the daisies are rose-scented,
And the Rose herself has got

Perfume which on earth is not,
among the music of all birds, and the wind-blown notes of flutes

hanging on the trees, methinks that your laughter sounds most
silvery sweet, and that Helen and fair Charmides are still of your

company. Master of mirth, and Soul the best contented of all that
have seen the world's ways clearly, most clear-sighted of all that

have made tranquillity their bride, what other laughers dwell with
you, where the crystal and fragrant waters wander round the shining

palaces and the temples of amethyst?
Heine surely is with you; if, indeed, it was not one Syrian soul

that dwelt among alien men, Germans and Romans, in the bodily
tabernacles of Heine and of Lucian. But he was fallen on evil times

and evil tongues; while Lucian, as witty as he, as bitter in
mockery, as happily dowered with the magic of words, lived long and

happily and honoured, imprisoned in no "mattress-grave." Without
Rabelais, without Voltaire, without Heine, you would find, methinks,

even the joys of your Happy Islands lacking in zest; and, unless
Plato came by your way, none of the ancients could meet you in the

lists of sportive dialogue.
There, among the vines that bear twelve times in the year, more

excellent than all the vineyards of Touraine, while the song-birds
bring you flowers from vales enchanted, and the shapes of the

Blessed come and go, beautiful in wind-woven raiment of sunset hues;
there, in a land that knows not age, nor winter, midnight, nor

autumn, nor noon, where the silver twilight of summer-dawn is
perennial, where youth does not wax spectre-pale and die; there, my

Lucian, you are crowned the Prince of the Paradise of Mirth.
Who would bring you, if he had the power, from the banquet where

Homer sings: Homer, who, in mockery of commentators, past and to
come, German and Greek, informed you that he was by birth a

Babylonian? Yet, if you, who first wrote Dialogues of the Dead,
could hear the prayer of an epistle wafted to "lands indiscoverable

in the unheard-of West," you might visit once more a world so worthy
of such a mocker, so like the world you knew so well of old.

Ah, Lucian, we have need of you, of your sense and of your mockery!
Here, where faith is sick and superstition is waking afresh; where

gods come rarely, and spectres appear at five shillings an
interview; where science is popular, and philosophy cries aloud in

the market-place, and clamour does duty for government, and Thais
and Lais are names of power--here, Lucian, is room and scope for

you. Can I not imagine a new "Auction of Philosophers," and what
wealth might be made by him who bought these popular sages and

lecturers at his estimate, and vended them at their own?
HERMES: Whom shall we put first up to auction?

ZEUS: That German in spectacles; he seems a highly respectable man.
HERMES: Ho, Pessimist, come down and let the public view you.

ZEUS: Go on, put him up and have done with him.
HERMES: Who bids for the Life Miserable, for extreme, complete,

perfect, unredeemable perdition? What offers for the universal
extinction of the species, and the collapse of the Conscious?

A PURCHASER: He does not look at all a bad lot. May one put him
through his paces?

HERMES: Certainly; try your luck.
PURCHASER: What is your name?

PESSIMIST: Hartmann.
PURCHASER: What can you teach me?

PESSIMIST: That Life is not worth Living.
PURCHASER: Wonderful Most edifying! How much for this lot?

HERMES: Two hundred pounds.
PURCHASER: I will write you a cheque for the money. Come home,

Pessimist, and begin your lessons without more ado.
HERMES: Attention! Here is a magnificent article--the Positive

Life, the Scientific Life, the Enthusiastic Life. Who bids for a
possible place in the Calendar of the Future?

PURCHASER: What does he call himself? he has a very French air.
HERMES: Put your own questions.

PURCHASER: What's your pedigree, my Philosopher, and previous
performances?

POSITIVIST: I am by Rousseau out of Catholicism, with a strain of
the Evolution blood.

PURCHASER: What do you believe in?
POSITIVIST: In Man, with a large M.

PURCHASER: Not in individual Man?
POSITIVIST: By no means; not even always in Mr. Gladstone. All

men, all Churches, all parties, all philosophies, and even the other
sect of our own Church, are perpetually in the wrong. Buy me, and

listen to me, and you will always be in the right.
PURCHASER: And, after this life, what have you to offer me?

POSITIVIST: A distinguished position in the Choir Invisible; but
not, of course, conscious immortality.

PURCHASER: Take him away, and put up another lot.
Then the Hegelian, with his Notion, and the Darwinian, with his

notions, and the Lotzian, with his Broad Church mixture of Religion
and Evolution, and the Spencerian, with that Absolute which is a

sort of a something, might all be offered with their divers wares;
and cheaply enough, Lucian, you would value them in this auction of

Sects. "There is but one way to Corinth," as of old; but which that
way may be, oh master of Hermotimus, we know no more than he did of

old; and still we find, of all philosophies, that the Stoic route is
most to be recommended. But we have our Cyrenaics too, though they

are no longer "clothed in purple, and crowned with flowers, and fond
of drink and of female flute-players." Ah, here too, you might

laugh, and fail to see where the Pleasure lies, when the Cyrenaics
are no "judges of cakes" (nor of ale, for that matter), and are

strangers in the Courts of Princes. "To despise all things, to make
use of all things, in all things to follow pleasure only:" that is

not the manner of the new, if it were the secret of the older
Hedonism.

Then, turning from the philosophers to the seekers after a sign,
what change, Lucian, would you find in them and their ways? None;

they are quite unaltered. Still our Peregrinus, and our Peregrina
too, come to us from the East, or, if from the West, they take India

on their way--India, that secular home of drivelling creeds, and of
religion in its sacerdotage. Still they prattle of Brahmins and

Buddhism; though, unlike Peregrinus, they do not publicly burn
themselves on pyres, at Epsom Downs, after the Derby. We are not so

fortunate in the demise of our Theosophists; and our police, less
wise than the Hellenodicae, would probably not permit the Immolation

of the Quack. Like your Alexander, they deal in marvels and
miracles, oracles and warnings. All such bogy stories as those of

your "Philopseudes," and the ghost of the lady who took to table-
rapping because one of her best slippers had not been burned with

her body, are gravely investigated by the Psychical Society.
Even your ignorant Bibliophile is still with us--the man without a

tinge of letters, who buys up old manuscripts "because they are
stained and gnawed, and who goes, for proof of valued antiquity, to

the testimony of the book-worms." And the rich Bibliophile now, as
in your satire, clothes his volumes in purple morocco and gay

dorures, while their contents are sealed to him.
As to the topics of satire and gay curiosity which occupy the lady

known as "Gyp," and M. Halevy in his "Les Petites Cardinal," if you
had not exhausted the matter in your "Dialogues of Hetairai," you

would be amused to find the same old traits surviving without a
touch of change. One reads, in Halevy's French, of Madame Cardinal,