e temple of
art and beauty; the Delphic tripod of poetic inspiration; the solace of
the earthworn drudge; in a word, the theatre; which your patriarch, if
he could, would convert to-morrow into a--but the philosopher must not
revile. Ah! I see the prefect's apparitors at the gate. He is making the
polity, as we call it here; the dispositions; settling, in short,
the bill of fare for the day, in compliance with the public palate. A
facetious pantomime dances here on this day every week--admired by
some, the Jews especially. To the more classic taste, many of his
movements--his recoil, especially--are wanting in the true antique
severity--might be called, perhaps, on the whole, indecent. Still the
weary pilgrim must be amused. Let us step in and hear.'

But before Philammon could refuse, an uproar arose within, a rush
outward of the mob, and inward of the prefect's apparitors.

'It is false!' shouted many voices. 'A Jewish calumny! The man is
innocent!'

'There is no more sedition in him than there is in me,' roared a fat
butcher, who looked as ready to fell a man as an ox. 'He was always the
first and the last to clap the holy patriarch at sermon.'

'Dear tender soul,' whimpered a woman; 'and I said to him only this
morning, why don't you flog my boys, Master Hierax? how can you expect
them to learn if they are not flogged? And he said, he never could abide
the sight of a rod, it made his back tingle so.'

'Which was plainly a prophecy!'

'And proves him innocent; for how could he prophesy if he was not one of
the holy ones?'

'Monks, to the rescue! Hierax, a Christian, is taken and tortured in the
theatre!' thundered a wild hermit, his beard and hair streaming about
his chest and shoulders.

'Nitria! Nitria! For God and the mother of God, monks of Nitria! Down
with the Jewish slanderers! Down with heathen tyrants!'--And the mob,
reinforced as if by magic by hundreds from without, swept down the huge
vaulted passage, carrying Philammon and the porter with them.

'My friends,' quoth the little man, trying to look philosophically calm,
though he was fairly off his legs, and hanging between heaven and earth
on the elbows of the bystanders, 'whence this tumult?'

'The Jews got up a cry that Hierax wanted to raise a riot. Curse them
and their sabbath, they are always rioting on Saturdays about this
dancer of theirs, instead of working like honest Christians!'

'And rioting on Sunday instead. Ahem! sectarian diffe