Lorraine
glass of modern tinting, thinks them on the whole wonderfully like
himself. Horace chaffs with Caesar and Maecenas, Martial quizzes the world
and the reader very much as modern club-men and poets would do. It is
very convenient to forget how much they have been imitated; still more
so to ignore that in both are stores of recondite mode and feeling as
yet unpenetrated by any scholar of these days. You think, my brave
_Artium Baccalaureus_, that you feel all that Hafiz felt,--surely he
toped and bussed like a good fellow of all times,--and yet for seven
centuries the most embracing of scholars have folioed and disputed over
the real meaning of that Song of Solomon which is now first beginning to
be understood from Hafiz. Man, I tell you that in the old morning of
history there were races whose life-blood glowed hotter than ever yours
did, with a burning faith, such as you never felt, that all which you
now believe to be most execrably infamous was intensely holy. Your
wisest scholars lose themselves in trying to unthread the mazes and
mysteries of those incomprehensible depths of diabolical worship and
intertwined beauty and honor, now known only from trebly diminished
mythologic reflection. Perhaps some of those undecipherable hieroglyphs
of the East are not so unintelligible to you now as they would be if
translated. Do you, for that matter, fully understand why a Hindu yoghi
torments himself for thirty years? I observe that the great majority of
our good, kind missionaries have no glimmering of an idea why it is
done. Brother Zeal, of the first part, says it is superstition. Father
Squeal, of the second part, says it is the devil. Very good indeed--so
far as it goes.

But look to later ages, and see whether man has been so strikingly
similar to us of the present day. There are manias and mysteries of the
Middle Ages whose history is smothered in darkness; lost to us out of
sheer incapacity to be understood from any modern standpoint of sense or
feeling whatever. What do you make out of that crusade of scores of
thousands of unarmed, delirious Christians, who started eastward to
redeem the holy sepulchre; all their faith and hope of safety being in a
goose and a pig which they bore with them? And they all died, those
earnest Goose-and-Pigites; died in untold misery and murder--unhappy
'superstition again.' That bolt is soon shot; but I have my misgivings
whether it reaches the mark.

Or what do you make of u