is more striking, of the finest spirituality with the
crudest paganism.

Here then, in the magical arena of the early world of Greece, we see in
one of its most romantic forms the age-long strife between paganism and
spirituality. We have taken at random four of the most popular stories
of Greece. We have found in each of them pagan elements partly
bequeathed by that earlier and lower earth-bound worship which preceded
the Olympians, partly added in decadent days when the mind of man was
turned from the heights and grovelling again. But we have seen a deeper
meaning in them, far further-reaching than any story of days and nights
or of years and seasons. It is a story of the aspiring spirit which is
ever wistful here on the green earth (although that indeed is pleasant),
and which finds its home among high thoughts, and ideas which dwell in
heaven. We shall see many aspects of the same twofold thought and life,
as we move about from point to point among the literature of later days.
Yet we shall seldom find any phase of the conflict which has not been
prophesied, or at least foreshadowed, in these legends of the dawn. The
link that binds the earliest to the latest page of literature is just
that human nature which, through all changes of country and of time,
remains essentially the same. It is this which lends to our subject its
individual as well as its historical interest. The battle is for each of
us our own battle, and its victories and defeats are our own.

LECTURE II

MARIUS THE EPICUREAN

Much has been written, before and after the day of Walter Pater,
concerning that singularly pure and yet singularly disappointing
character, Marcus Aurelius, and his times. The ethical and religious
ferment of the period has been described with great fullness and
sympathy by Professor Dill. Yet it may be said, without fear of
contradiction, that no book has ever been written, nor is likely ever to
appear, which has conveyed to those who came under its spell a more
intimate and familiar conception of that remarkable period and man than
that which has been given by Walter Pater's _Marius the Epicurean_.

Opinion is divided about the value of Pater's work, and if it be true
that some of his admirers have provoked criticism by their unqualified
praise, it is no less true that many of his detractors appear never to
have come in contact with his mind at all. Born in 1839, he spent the
greater part of his life in Queen's C