empty mouths of the lower classes, and the
empty heads of the higher, seemed to have
entered into a conspiracy against the least
common of all common things—common
sense. Metaphysical sophists and charlatan
priests carefully excluded the stray sunbeams
of disenchanting truth from the temple of
error. We need not boast of our intimacy
with the world of spirits. If Venus and
Bacchus, as we have been told, appear to the
favoured neophytes of frappulant spiritualism
now (and Bacchus, at any rate, may have
more to do with this sort of second sight
or seeing double than is thought for), the
initiated of that day were equally favoured
with visits from the deities of love and wine.
It would be diflicult to say whether we
should give the preference to the old or new
spirits. Your modern spirit lies uncommonly
well, but your ancient spirit runs him very
hard. In that age folly, juvenile and senile,
ignorance, learned and unlearned, believed
that it could call spirits from the vasty deep
or from the starry sphere, and that they
really did come when called. Superhuman
agents were always ready, they thought, to
do any fool's bidding. An old woman of
Thessaly could suspend the course of nature.
At the request of capricious dotage, the
moon would descend or return to heaven
without the slightest respect for the law of
gravitation, and perfectly oblivious of the
fact, that she "rules all the sea as well as
half the land," would leave the tides to shift
for themselves. Statues leapt from their
pedestals with a light and airy step, and
explored the premises in the witching hour
of night. Demons issued, black and smoke-
dried, from the bodies of the possessed,
compelled to retire before the incantations of
some oriental exorcist. Magical rings, made
from the iron of a gibbet, were regarded with
peculiar favour by the sympathising world of
choice spirits. Even the gods shook in their
divine sandals, and acknowledged the power
that dwelt in the minatory charms of an
Egyptian priest. The lingering faith in
these tremulous divinities was accompanied
with a thousand practical mischiefs. The
fairest legends of the Hellenic past, glorified
in Homer's epics, and moralised in Sophocles's
tragedies, strengthened the tyranny of a
fictitious and demoralising creed. Philosophy
was as bad as poetry, or worse. Stoics,
Epicureans, Academics, and Peripatetics
carried on a thriving trade in logic and rhetoric;
and the aspiration of Plato, the wisdom of
Epicurus, or the moral grandeur of Zeno,
became the capital of the salaried sophist,
not the treasure of the disinterested teacher.

Such in Lucian's eyes was the intellectual
and moral character of the second century.
For the evils that afflicted society, a remedy
was imperatively demanded, but it was not
in Lucian's power to supply it. But if he
could not create he could not destroy. If he
had no religion to give mankind; if he was
even anti-scientific and hostile to physical
investigation, he had an admirable common
sense, a keen detective sagacity, a wit sharp
as a Damascus blade and brilliant as a
diamond, and he employed all the resources
of his reason and fyncy in the demolition of
the gigantic fabric of imposture and
falsehood. He brought the artillery of his mocking
humour to play on the temples of the deities
of classic Greece and Rome, in his imaginary
conversations of the gods of heaven, earth
and sea, and his conferences of the dead. He
exposed the pretensions and dissimulation of
the heathen priests and sophists in his
dialogues entitled The Runaway Slaves;
Hermotimus and the Resuscitated
Philosophers. He ridiculed the morbid love of
self-mortification and self-destruction in the
Death of Peregrinus, and drew many a wild
and witty portrait of the folly, vanity, and
delusion of mankind.

In the True History the prototype of all
the voyages imaginaires, including that of the
renowned Gulliver, Lucian splendidly
satirises the general tendency of the human
mind to believe miraculous and impossible
stories. It is a parody on travellers' tales.
Lucian tries to make them ridiculous by
telling tales twice as good as theirs. Shake
your cap and bells, he says, you wonderful
adventurers! I can jingle in harmony with
you.

One Ctesias had told some creditable lies in
his account of Persia, but Lucian undertook to
lie him out of the field altogether. A certain
Jambulus, too, was a pretty good hand at the
long-bow, but if range of shot were the
thing wanted, he was no match for Lucian.
His True History may be considered as an
illustrative Essay on Lying made Easy. Let
us peep into its pages. His adventurers set
sail from Cadiz. They enter the Hesperian
ocean, and landing on a woody island,
observe a pillar of brass with this inscription:
Thus far came Bacchus and Hercules.
Presently they arrive at a river which instead
of water runs with wine. "Such an evident
sign," remarks the narrator, "that Bacchus
had once been there served not a little to
confirm our faith in the inscription on the
pillar."

Continuing his journey he passes near
the clouds, descries the famous city of
Cloud-Cuckootown and praises the wisdom
and veracity of the poet Aristophanes, whose
account of the city has been unjustly
discredited. Filling their empty casks partly
with common water and partly from the
wine-stream, they weigh anchor in the morning
with a moderate breeze. About noon
they are overtaken by a whirlwind, twisted
round and round, carried up miles into the
air, drifting above the clouds with flowing
sail. Here they encounter all kinds of strange
and wondrous beings. Horse-vultures
conduct them to the king, who turns out to be
our old friend Endymion, translated in sleep