foolery, tired of the everlasting old pipe that they have to get up to dance to, and weary of longing for just one hour of vigorous youth, when their poison fangs were still in their jaws, that they might send the old man who charms them to his forefathers in exactly twenty minutes by the clock. But Mr. Ruskin works only with fresh-caught subjects, or, at any rate, with old subjects so revivified that they leap from under his hand, each of them a surprise. The wise snakes of Colchis and of Thebes and of Delphi — I need not identify them more exactly — fall briskly into their places in the ring of the creative system, and every flower furnishes forth a Pythonissa to tell our new Apollo the secrets of a new cult. Does genius feed on snakes, that it never grows old? The ancients said that the flesh of the ophidians, though the deadliest of created things, gave eternal youth, and even cured death, itself; and, though fatal as the shears of Atropos, the poison of asps was the supreme drug in the cabinet of the God of Doctors.
Even to our own day the legend comes down, tamed of course to suit the feeble representatives of the serpent kind that are found in this country; for in English folk-lore it is an article of belief that the flesh of vipers is an antidote to their poison, and that, though “the beauteous adder hath a sting, it bears a balsam too.” All dangerous swellings also, such as erysipelas and goitres, may be cured, it is satisfactory to know on rustic authority, by eating a viper from the tail upwards, like a carrot; or, simpler still, by rubbing the affected part with a harmless grass-snake, and; then burying the worm alive in a bottle. But the justice here appears to me very defective, and will no doubt recall that duel the other day, where two women went out to fight “for all
