rent picture that the
book presents. Pater well compares it to a dream: "Story within
story--stories with the sudden, unlooked-for changes of dreams." And, as
though to suit this dream-like inconsequence, the scene is laid in
Thessaly, the natural home of witchcraft--where, in fact, I was myself
laid under a witch's incantation little more than ten years ago, and
might have been transformed into heaven knows what, if a remembered
passage from this same book of Apuleius had not caused an outburst of
laughter that broke the spell only just in time. It is a savage country,
running into deep glens of forest and precipitous defiles among the
mountains, fit haunt for the robber bands with which the few roads were
infested. The region where the Lucius of the book wandered, either as
man, or after his own curiosity into mysterious things had converted him
into an ass (whereas he had wished to become a beautiful bird)--the
region recalls some wild picture of Salvator Rosa's. We are surrounded
by gloomy shades, sepulchral caverns, and trees writhing in storm, nor
are cut-throat bandits ever far away. Violence and murder threaten at
every turn. Through the narrow and filthy streets young noblemen, flown
with wine, storm at midnight. When a robber chief is nailed through the
hand to a door, his devoted followers hew off his arm and set him free.
They capture girls for ransom, and sell them to panders. When one is
troublesome, they propose to sew her up in the paunch of the yet living
ass, and expose her to the mid-day sun. One of the gang, disguised as a
bear, slays all his keepers, and is himself torn in pieces by men and
dogs. All the band are finally slaughtered or flung from precipices.
Gladiatorial beasts are kept as sepulchres for criminals. A slave is
smeared with honey and slowly devoured by ants till only his white
skeleton remains tied to a tree. A dragon eats one of the party, quite
cursorily. What with bears, wolves, wild boars, and savage dogs, each
step in life would seem a peril, were not the cruelty of man more
perilous still. Continued existence in that region was, indeed, so
insecure, that men and women in large numbers ended the torments of
anxiety by cutting life short.

And then there were the witches, perpetually adding to the uncertainty
by rendering it dubious in what form one might awake, if one awoke at
all. During sleep, a witch could draw the heart out through a hole in
the neck, and, stopping up the ori