to break their word.
There, where in other days noble minds, protected by the overshadowing
favor of princes, followed out great ideas, they now teach nothing but
words--empty, useless words. I saw and said that yesterday, and now I
know it for certain--every poison shaft that your malice has aimed at me
was forged in the Museum."

He paused for breath, and then continued, with a contemptuous laugh:

"If the justice which you rate higher than logic were to take its
course, nothing would be juster than to make an end this day of this
hot-bed of corruption. But your unlearned fellow-citizens shall taste
of my justice, too. You yourself will be prevented by the beasts in the
Circus from looking on at the effect your warning words have produced.
But as yet you are alive, and you shall hear what the experiences are
which make the severest measures the highest justice.

"What did I hope to find, and what have I really found? I heard the
Alexandrians praised for their hospitality--for the ardor with
which they pursue learning--for the great proficiency of their
astronomers--for the piety which has raised so many altars and invented
so many doctrines; and, lastly, for the beauty and fine wit of their
women.

"And this hospitality! All that I have known of it is a flood of
malicious abuse and knavish scoffing, which penetrated even to the gates
of this temple, my dwelling. I came here as emperor, and treason pursued
me wherever I went--even into my own apartments; for there you stand,
whom a barbarian had to hinder from stabbing me with the knife of the
assassin. And your learning? You have heard my opinion of the Museum.
And the astrologers of this renowned observatory? The very opposite of
all they promised me has come to pass.

"Religion? The people, of whom you know as little from the musty volumes
of the Museum as of 'Ultima Thule'--the people indeed practice it. The
old gods are necessary to them. They are the bread of life to them.
But instead of those you have offered them sour, unripe fruit, with a
glittering rind-from your own garden, of your own growing. The fruit of
trees is a gift from Nature, and all that she brings forth has some good
in it; but what you offer to the world is hollow and poisonous. Your
rhetoric gives it an attractive exterior, and that, too, comes from the
Museum. There they are shrewd enough to create new gods, which start up
out of the earth like mushrooms. If it should only occur to them,