f which might have
sprung 'remedial measures' not a few. But no: the men of the Dead Sea
discovered, as the valet-species always does in heroes or prophets, no
comeliness in Moses; listened with real tedium to Moses, with light
grinning, or with splenetic sniffs and sneers, affecting even to yawn;
and signified, in short, that they found him a humbug, and even a
bore. Such was the candid theory these men of the Asphalt Lake formed
to themselves of Moses, That probably he was a humbug, that certainly
he was a bore.

Moses withdrew; but Nature and her rigorous veracities did not
withdraw. The men of the Dead Sea, when we next went to visit them,
were all 'changed into Apes;'[27] sitting on the trees there, grinning
now in the most _un_affected manner; gibbering and chattering very
genuine nonsense; finding the whole Universe now a most indisputable
Humbug! The Universe has _become_ a Humbug to these Apes who thought
it one. There they sit and chatter, to this hour: only, I believe,
every Sabbath there returns to them a bewildered half-consciousness,
half-reminiscence; and they sit, with their wizened smoke-dried
visages, and such an air of supreme tragicality as Apes may; looking
out through those blinking smoke-bleared eyes of theirs, into the
wonderfulest universal smoky Twilight and undecipherable disordered
Dusk of Things; wholly an Uncertainty, Unintelligibility, they and it;
and for commentary thereon, here and there an unmusical chatter or
mew:--truest, tragicalest Humbug conceivable by the mind of man or
ape! They made no use of their souls; and so have lost them. Their
worship on the Sabbath now is to roost there, with unmusical
screeches, and half-remember that they had souls.

Didst thou never, O Traveller, fall-in with parties of this tribe?
Meseems they are grown somewhat numerous in our day.

FOOTNOTES:

[27] Sale's _Koran_ (Introduction).

CHAPTER IV.

HAPPY.

All work, even cotton-spinning, is noble; work is alone noble:
be that here said and asserted once more. And in like manner too,
all dignity is painful; a life of ease is not for any man, nor for
any god. The life of all gods figures itself to us as a Sublime
Sadness,--earnestness of Infinite Battle against Infinite Labour. Our
highest religion is named the 'Worship of Sorrow.' For the son of man
there is no noble crown, well worn or even ill worn, but is a crown of
thorns!--These things, in spoken words, or still better, in felt
in