as a wolf-dog or bloodhound; and
he raises his own _manes_, poor, stridulous Struldbrugs.

Vainly did the ancient Pagans fight against this fatal weakness.

They may confer upon their Gods glittering titles of 'ambrosial,'
'immortal'; but the human mind is careless of positive assertion, and of
clamorous iteration in however angry a tone, when silently it observes
stealing out of facts already conceded some fatal consequence at war
with all these empty pretensions--mortal even in _the virtual_
conceptions of the Pagans. If the Pagan Gods were really immortal, if
essentially they repelled the touch of mortality, and not through the
adulatory homage of their worshipers causing their true aspects to
unsettle or altogether to disappear in clouds of incense, then how came
whole dynasties of Gods to pass away, and no man could tell whither? If
really they defied the grave, then how was it that age and the
infirmities of age passed upon them like the shadow of eclipse upon the
golden faces of the planets? If Apollo were a beardless young man, his
father was not such--_he_ was in the vigour of maturity; maturity is a
flattering term for expressing it, but it means _past youth_--and his
grandfather was superannuated. But even this grandfather, who _had_ been
once what Apollo was now, could not pretend to more than a transitory
station in the long succession of Gods. Other dynasties, known even to
man, there had been before his; and elder dynasties before _that_, of
whom only rumours and suspicions survived. Even this taint, however,
this _direct_ access of mortality, was less shocking to my mind in
after-years than the abominable fact of its reflex or indirect access in
the shape of grief for others who had died. I need not multiply
instances; they are without end. The reader has but to throw his memory
back upon the anguish of Jupiter, in the 'Iliad,' for the approaching
death of his son Sarpedon, and his vain struggles to deliver himself
from this ghastly net; or upon Thetis, fighting against the vision of
her matchless Pelides caught in the same vortex; or upon the Muse in
Euripides, hovering in the air and wailing over her young Rhesus, her
brave, her beautiful one, of whom she trusted that he had been destined
to confound the Grecian host. What! a God, and liable to the pollution
of grief! A Goddess, and standing every hour within the peril of that
dismal shadow!

Here in one moment mark the recoil, the intolerable recoi