the pagan heaven, he seems often to repudiate the existence of any divine principle at all; so when he holds up to derision the charlatans and impostors who sheltered themselves under the names of the great masters of old times, and who pushed their tenets to absurdity, he lays himself open to the charge of caricaturing those venerable sages themselves.
But, in truth, veneration for great names is a luxury in which the satirist by profession can rarely afford to indulge. The exigencies of his craft go nigh to forbid him to hold anything sacred. We know how constantly, even in our more decorous modern days, the man who has a keen taste for humour and reputation for being amusing is tempted to make jests which savour of profanity, while he may very possibly be no more profane at heart than those who profess themselves shocked by his levity of tone. It has been remarked already, in one of the preceding volumes of this series, in speaking of Aristophanes, that we may be quite wrong in assuming that he bore any malice against Socrates, or was insensible to the higher qualities of his character, because he found that it suited his purpose to caricature some of the eccentricities of so well known a personage for the comic stage: and we may be doing Lucian equal injustice in accusing him of atheism, because in his writings he touches only the absurd side of a faith which was fast passing away and leaving as yet nothing in its place; or in thinking that he sneers at all great intellectual discoveries, because he found in the contradictions and the sophistries of the Schools such congenial matter for his pen. And although,
