e Horace was sitting in his easy-chair, giving his countrymen good
advice, a private man, who knew somewhat better than he what the mass
admired, was exhibiting forty thousand gladiators at his mother's
funeral.'

'But the canon has its foundation in the eternal laws of beauty. It has
been accepted and observed.'

'Not by the people for whom it was written. The learned Hypatia has
surely not forgotten, that within sixty years after the _Ars Poetica_
was written, Annaeus Seneca, or whosoever wrote that very bad tragedy
called the Medea, found it so necessary that she should, in despite of
Horace, kill her children before the people, that he actually made her
do it!'

Hypatia was still silent--foiled at every point, while Orestes ran on
with provoking glibness.

'And consider, too, even if we dare alter Aeschylus a little, we could
find no one to act him.'

'Ah, true! fallen, fallen days!'

'And really, after all, omitting the questionable compliment to me, as
candidate for a certain dignity, of having my namesake kill his mother,
and then be hunted over the stage by furies--'

'But Apollo vindicates and purifies him at last. What a noble occasion
that last scene would give for winning them hack to their old reverence
for the god!'

'True, but at present the majority of spectators will believe more
strongly in the horrors of matricide and furies than in Apollo's power
to dispense therewith. So that I fear must be one of your labours of the
future.'

'And it shall be,' said Hypatia. But she did not speak cheerfully.

'Do you not think, moreover,' went on the tempter, 'that those old
tragedies might give somewhat too gloomy a notion of those deities whom
we wish to reintroduce--I beg pardon, to rehonour? The history of the
house of Atreus is hardly more cheerful, in spite of its beauty, than
one of Cyril's sermons on the day of judgment, and the Tartarus prepared
for hapless rich people?'

'Well,' said Hypatia, more and more listlessly; 'it might be more
prudent to show them first the fairer and more graceful side of the
old Myths. Certainly the great age of Athenian tragedy had its playful
reverse in the old comedy.'

'And in certain Dionysiac sports and processions which shall be
nameless, in order to awaken a proper devotion for the gods in those who
might not be able to appreciate Aeschylus and Sophocles.'

'You would not reintroduce them?'

'Pallas forbid! but give as fair a substitute for them as we