is literal. It had lost resilience and spring, and if one pointed out to it that Zeus had behaved absurdly in Homer, it could summon no rush of instinct or of poetry with which to defend his worship. Demeter too! And shrines to the sneezing Apollo and to the gouty and to the coughing Artemis! Ha! Ha! Fancy believing in a goddess with the gout. Clement makes great play with such nonsense. For a new religion has, as far as persiflage is concerned, an advantage over an old one: it has not had time itself to evolve a mythology, and his adversaries could not retort with references to St. Simeon Stylites, or to the plague spot of St. Roch, or to St. Fina who allowed a devil to throw her mother down the stairs. They could only hang their heads and assent, and when Clement derided the priests in the idol-temples for their dirt, they could not foresee that in the following century dirt would be recommended as holy by the Church. They were caught by his genial air and by his "logic"; there is nothing morose about the treatises, and even to-day they are readable, though not quite in the way that the author intended.
A solemn assembly of Greeks, held in honour of a dead serpent, was gathering at Pytho, and Eunomus sang a funeral ode for the reptile. Whether his song was a hymn in praise of the snake or a lamentation over it, I cannot say; but there was a competition and Eunomus was playing the lyre in the heat of the day, at the time when the grasshoppers, warmed by the sun, were singing under the leaves along the hills. They were singing, you see, not to the dead serpent of Pytho, but to the all-wise God, a spontaneous song, better than the measured strains of Eunomus. A string breaks in the Locrian's hands; the grasshopper settles upon the neck of the lyre and begins to twitter there as if upon a branch: whereupon the minstrel, by adapting his music to the grasshopper's lay, supplied
