satire on the love of
magic then prevalent, curiosity concerning which had led Lucius to
meddle with the old woman's appliances. "Be you my Venus," he says to
the pretty maid-servant who has introduced him to the view of Pamphile,
"and let me stand by you a winged Cupid!" and, freely applying the
magic ointment, sees himself transformed, "not into a bird, but into an
ass!"

Well! the proper remedy for his distress is a supper of roses, could
such be found, and many are his quaintly picturesque attempts to come
by them at that adverse season; as he contrives to do at last, when,
the grotesque procession of Isis [60] passing by with a bear and other
strange animals in its train, the ass following along with the rest
suddenly crunches the chaplet of roses carried in the High-priest's
hand.

Meantime, however, he must wait for the spring, with more than the
outside of an ass; "though I was not so much a fool, nor so truly an
ass," he tells us, when he happens to be left alone with a daintily
spread table, "as to neglect this most delicious fare, and feed upon
coarse hay." For, in truth, all through the book, there is an
unmistakably real feeling for asses, with bold touches like Swift's,
and a genuine animal breadth. Lucius was the original ass, who peeping
slily from the window of his hiding-place forgot all about the big
shade he cast just above him, and gave occasion to the joke or proverb
about "the peeping ass and his shadow."

But the marvellous, delight in which is one of the really serious
elements in most boys, passed at times, those young readers still
feeling its fascination, into what French writers call the
macabre--that species of almost insane pre-occupation with the
materialities of our mouldering flesh, that luxury of disgust in gazing
on corruption, which was connected, in this writer at least, with not a
little obvious coarseness. It was a strange notion of the gross lust
of the actual world, that Marius took from some of these episodes. "I
am told," they read, "that [61] when foreigners are interred, the old
witches are in the habit of out-racing the funeral procession, to
ravage the corpse"--in order to obtain certain cuttings and remnants
from it, with which to injure the living--"especially if the witch has
happened to cast her eye upon some goodly young man." And the scene of
the night-watching of a dead body lest the witches should come to tear
off the flesh with their teeth, is worthy of