the latter's_ la carriere ouverte aux talents, _but not in
opportunity given to every dunce or dancing bear. He holds Atta Troll's
opinion to be "high treason against the majesty of humanity," and since
he can endure this no longer, he sets out one fine morning to hunt the
insolent bear in his mountain fastnesses._

_A strange being, however, accompanies him. This is a man of the name of
Lascaro, a somewhat abnormal fellow, who is very thin, very pale, and
apparently in very poor health. He is consequently not exactly a
pleasant comrade for the chase: he does not seem to enjoy the sport at
all, and his one endeavour is to get through with his task without
losing more of his strength and health. Even now he is more of an
automaton than a human being, more dead than alive, and yet--greatest of
all miseries!--he is not allowed to die. For he has a mother, the witch
Uraka, who keeps him artificially alive by anointing him every night
with magic salve and giving him such diabolic advice as will be useful
to him during the day. By means of the sham health she gives to her son,
the magic bullets she casts for him, the tricks and wiles she teaches
him, Lascaro is enabled to find the track of Atta Troll, to lure him out
of his lair and to lay him low with a treacherous shot._

_Who is this silent Lascaro and his mysterious mother, whom the poet
seems to hold in as slight regard as the noisy Atta Troll? Who is this
Lascaro, whose methods he deprecates, whose health he doubts, whose cold
ways and icy smiles make him shudder? Who is this chilliest of all
monsters? The chilliest of all monsters--we may find the answer in
"Zarathustra"--is the State: and our Lascaro is nothing else than the
spirit of reactionary government, kept artificially alive by his old
witch-mother, the spirit of Feudalism. The nightly anointing of Lascaro
is a parody on the revival of mediaeval customs, by means of which the
frightened aristocracy of Europe in the middle of the last century tried
to stem the tide of the French Revolution--the anointed of the Lord
becoming in Heine's poem the anointed of the witch. But in spite of his
nightly massage, our Lascaro does not gain much strength or spirit: no
mediaeval salves, no feudal pills, no witch's spell, will ever cure him.
Not even a wizard's experiments (we may add, with that greater insight
bestowed upon us by history) could do him any good, not even the astute
magic tricks that were lavished upon the pat