f this Benjamin of a classic literature's old age.

Apuleius was an unconventional cosmopolitan in that ancient world
which he so vividly portrays; he was a barbarian by birth, a Greek by
education, and wrote his book in the Romans' language. In his use
of luminous slang for literary purposes he was Rudyard Kipling's
prototype.

"He would twist the vulgar words of every-day into quaint unheard-of
meanings, nor did he deny shelter to those loafers and footpads of
speech which inspire the grammarian with horror. On every page you
encounter a proverb, a catchword, a literary allusion, a flagrant
redundancy. One quality only was distasteful to him--the commonplace."

There are other respects in which we can trace Mr. Kipling's likeness:
in his youthful precocity--he was twenty-five when he wrote his
_Metamorphoses_; in his daring as an innovator; in his manly
stalwartness in dealing with the calamities of life; in his
adventurous note of world-wideness and realistic method of handling
the improbable and uncanny.

Like all great artists, he was a skilful borrower from the literary
achievements of a bygone age; and so successfully does he borrow that
we prefer his copy to the original. The germ-idea of Kipling's _Finest
Story in the World_ is to be found in Poe's _Tale of the Ragged
Mountains_; Apuleius's germ-plot, of the man who was changed by
enchantment into an ass, and could only recover his human shape by
eating rose-leaves, was taken either from Lucian or from Lucius
of Patrae. In at least three of his interpolations he remarkably
foreshadows the prose short-story method, upon which we are wont to
pride ourselves as being a unique discovery of the past eight decades:
these are _Bellepheron's Story; The Story of Cupid and Psyche_, one of
the most exquisite both in form and matter in any language or age; and
the story of _The Deceitful Woman and the Tub_, which Boccaccio made
use of in his _Decameron_ as the second novel for the seventh day.

In the intense and visual quality of the atmosphere with which he
pervades his narrative he has no equal among the writers of English
prose-fiction until Sir Walter Scott appears. "Apuleius has enveloped
his world of marvels in a heavy air of witchery and romance. You
wander with Lucius across the hills and through the dales of Thessaly.
With all the delight of a fresh curiosity you approach its far-seen
towns. You journey at midnight under the stars, listening in terror
for t