fallen into the hands of fools. All knowledge was lost. In those days it
was held to be a great merit to sing among the choir, and those who
remembered a few sentences from the Bible passed for prodigious
geniuses. There were still poets as there were birds, but their verse
went lame in every foot. The ancient demons, the good genii of mankind,
shorn of their honours, driven forth, pursued, hunted down, remained
hidden in the woods. There, if they still showed themselves to men, they
adopted, to hold them in awe, a terrible face, a red, green, or black
skin, baleful eyes, an enormous mouth fringed with boars' teeth, horns,
a tail, and sometimes a human face on their bellies. The nymphs remained
fair, and the barbarians, ignorant of the winsome names they bore in
other days, called them fairies, and, imputing to them a capricious
character and puerile tastes, both feared and loved them.

"We had suffered a grievous fall, and our ranks were sadly thinned;
nevertheless we did not lose courage and, maintaining a laughing aspect
and a benevolent spirit, we were in those direful days the real friends
of mankind. Perceiving that the barbarians grew daily less sombre and
less ferocious, we lent ourselves to the task of conversing with them
under all sorts of disguises. We incited them, with a thousand
precautions, and by prudent circumlocutions, not to acknowledge the old
Iahveh as an infallible master, not blindly to obey his orders, and not
to fear his menaces. When need was, we had recourse to magic. We
exhorted them unceasingly to study nature and to strive to discover the
traces of ancient wisdom.

"These warriors from the North--rude though they were--were acquainted
with some mechanical arts. They thought they saw combats in the heavens;
the sound of the harp drew tears from their eyes; and perchance they had
souls capable of greater things than the degenerate Gauls and Romans
whose lands they had invaded. They knew not how to hew stone or to
polish marble; but they caused porphyry and columns to be brought from
Rome and from Ravenna; their chief men took for their seal a gem
engraved by a Greek in the days when Beauty reigned supreme. They raised
walls with bricks, cunningly arranged like ears of corn, and succeeded
in building quite pleasing-looking churches with cornices upheld by
consoles depicting grim faces, and heavy capitals whereon were
represented monsters devouring one another.

"We taught them letters and