e track up to the little town, where Cicero once
waited to meet the assassin Brutus after the murder of the world's
greatest man; and there, in the ancient inn still called "Diana's
Looking-glass" from the old name of the beautiful and mysterious lake
which lies in profoundly mingled green and indigo below it, let us
forget impending doom over a twopenny quart of wine and a plate of
little cuttlefish stewed in garlic, after which any priest might
confront his successor with equanimity.

XXX

THE UNDERWORLD OF TIME

Sometimes, for a moment, the curtain of the past is rolled up, the seven
seals of its book are loosened, and we are allowed to know more of the
history than the round number of soldiers with which a general crossed a
river, or the succession that brought one crazy voluptuary to follow
another upon the Imperial throne. We do not refuse gratitude for what we
ordinarily receive. To the general it made all the difference whether he
had a thousand soldiers more or less, and to us it makes some. To the
Imperial maniac it was of consequence that his predecessor in the
government of civilised mankind was slain before him, and for us the
information counts for something, too; just as one meets travellers who
satisfy an artistic craving by enumerating the columns of a ruined
shrine, and seeing that they agree with the guidebook. But it is not
often that historians tell us what we really want to know, or that
artists will stoop to our questionings. We would willingly go wrong over
a thousand or two of those soldiers, if we might catch the language of
just one of them as he waded into the river; and how many a simpering
Venus would we grind into face-powder if we could follow for just one
day the thoughts of a single priest who once guarded her temple! But,
occupied with grandeur and beauty, the artists and historians move upon
their own elevated plane, and it is only by furtive glimpses that we
catch sight of the common and unclean underworld of life, always
lumbering along with much the same chaotic noise of hungry desires and
incessant labour, of animalism and spiritual aspiration.

One such glimpse we are given in that book of _The Golden Ass_, now
issued by the Clarendon Press, in Mr. H.E. Butler's English version, but
hitherto best known through a chapter in Walter Pater's _Marius_, or by
William Adlington's sixteenth century rendering, included among _The
Tudor Translations_. It is a strange and incohe