course, the road back towards Ostia, by which they had come thither
from the sea. And as he followed, careless where he went, he continued
talking to himself aloud after the manner of restless self-discontented
men.

....'And then man talks big about his dignity and his intellect, and
his heavenly parentage, and his aspirations after the unseen, and the
beautiful, and the infinite--and everything else unlike himself. How
can he prove it? Why, these poor blackguards lying about are very fair
specimens of humanity.--And how much have they been bothered since they
were born with aspirations after anything infinite, except infinite sour
wine? To eat, to drink; to destroy a certain number of their species; to
reproduce a certain number of the same, two-thirds of whom will die in
infancy, a dead waste of pain to their mothers and of expense to their
putative sires.... and then--what says Solomon? What befalls them
befalls beasts. As one dies, so dies the other; so that they have all
one breath, and a man has no pre-eminence over a beast; for all is
vanity. All go to one place; all are of the dust, and turn to dust
again. Who knows that the breath of man goes upward, and that the breath
of the beast goes downward to the earth? Who, indeed, my most wise
ancestor? Not I, certainly. Raphael Aben-Ezra, how art thou better than
a beast? W hat pre-eminence hast thou, not merely over this dog, But
over the fleas whom thou so wantonly cursest? Man must painfully win
house, clothes, fire.... A pretty proof of his wisdom, when every flea
has the wit to make my blanket, without any labour of his own, lodge him
a great deal better than it lodges me! Man makes clothes, and the fleas
live in them.... Which is the wiser of the two?....

'Ah, but--man is fallen.... Well--and the flea is not. So much better he
than the man; for he is what he was intended to be, and so fulfils the
very definition of virtue, which no one can say of us of the red-ochre
vein. And even if the old myth be true, and the man only fell, because
he was set to do higher work than the flea, what does that prove--but
that he could not do it?

'But his arts and his sciences?.... Apage! The very sound of those
grown-children's rattles turns me sick.... One conceited ass in a
generation increasing labour and sorrow, and dying after all even as
the fool dies, and ten million brutes and slaves, just where their
fore-fathers were, and where their children will be after them, t