ngth that some of
the drawbacks of _Les Natchez_ disappear almost automatically in _Les
Martyrs_. The supernatural machinery is, on the hypothesis and at the
time of the book, strictly congruous and proper; while, as a matter of
fact, it is in proportion rather less than more used. The time and
events--those of the persecution under Diocletian--are familiar,
interesting, and, in a French term for which we have no exact
equivalent, _dignes_. There is no sulky spider of a Rene crawling
about the piece; and though history is a little strained to
provide incidents,[32] "that's not much," and they are not in
themselves improbable in any bad sense or degree. Moreover, the
classical-dictionary element, which, as has been said, is so awkward to
handle, is, at least after the beginning, not too much drawn upon.

The book, in its later modern editions, is preceded not merely by
several Prefaces, but by an _Examen_ in the old fashion, and fortified
by those elaborate citation-notes[33] from authorities ancient and
modern which were a mania at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning
of the nineteenth century, and which sometimes divert and sometimes
enrage more modern readers in work so different as _Lalla Rookh_ and
_The Pursuits of Literature_, while they provided at the time material
for immortal jokes in such other work as the _Anti-Jacobin_ poems. In
the Prefaces Chateaubriand discusses the prose epic, and puts himself,
quite unnecessarily, under the protection of _Telemaque_: in the
_Examen_ he deals systematically with the objections, religious, moral,
and literary, which had been made against the earlier editions of the
book. But these things are now little more than curiosities for the
student, though they retain some general historical importance.

[Sidenote: The story.]

The book starts (after an "Invocation," proper to its scheme but perhaps
not specially attractive "to us") with an account of the household of
Demodocus, a Homerid of Chios, who in Diocletian's earlier and
unpersecuting days, after living happily but for too short a time in
Crete with his wife Epicharis, loses her, though she leaves him one
little daughter, Cymodocee, born in the sacred woods of Mount Ida
itself. Demodocus is only too glad to accept an invitation to become
high priest of a new Temple of Homer in Messenia, on the slopes of
another mountain, less, but not so much less, famous, Ithome. Cymodocee
becomes very beautiful, and receives,