, and, expatriated, dwelt a guest at the
Persian court. Strangely enough--and it is passing strange--the most
heroic personality in Homer's Iliad, the Greek's "Bible of heroisms,"
was not the Atridae, whether Agamemnon or Menelaus; not Ajax nor
Achilles, nor yet Ulysses; but was Hector, the Trojan, who appears to
greater advantage as hero than all the Grecian host. And Homer was a
Greek! This is strange and unaccountable irony. Say once more, the
old hero's lack was conscience. He, like his gods and goddesses, who
were deified infamies, was a studied impurity. Jean Valjean is a hero,
but a hero of a new type.

Literature is a sure index of a civilization. Who cares to settle in
his mind whether the world grows better, may do so by comparing
contemporaneous literature with the reading of other days. "The
Heptameron," of Margaret of Navarre, is a book so filthy as to be
nauseating. That people could read it from inclination is unthinkable;
and to believe that a woman could read it, much less write it, taxes
too sorely our credulity. In truth, this work did not, in the days of
its origin, shock the people's sensibilities. A woman wrote it, and
she a sister of Francis I of France, and herself Queen of Navarre, and
a pure woman. And her contemporaries, both men and women, read it with
delight, because they had parted company with blushes and modesty.
Zola is less voluptuous and filthy than these old tales. Some things
even Zola curtains. Margaret of Navarre tears the garments from the
bodies of men and women, and looks at their nude sensuality smilingly.
Of Boccaccio's "Decameron," the same general observations hold; save
that they are less filthy, though no less sensual. In the era
producing these tales, witness this fact: The stories are represented
as told by a company of gentlemen and ladies, the reciter being
sometimes a man, sometimes a woman; the place, a country villa, whither
they had fled to escape a plague then raging in Florence. The people,
so solacing themselves in retreat from a plague they should have
striven to alleviate by their presence and ministries, were the
gentility of those days, representing the better order of society, and
told stories which would now be venal if told by vulgar men in some
tavern of ill-repute. That Boccaccio should have reported these tales
as emanating from such a company is proof positive of the immodesty of
those days, whose story is rehearsed in the "Decameron