fice with a sponge, allow her victim
to pine in wonder why he felt so incomplete. With ointments compounded
of dead men's flesh she could transform a lover into a beaver, or an
innkeeper into a frog swimming in his own vat of wine and with doleful
croak inviting his former customers to drink; or herself, with the aid
of a little shaking, she could convert into a feathered owl uttering a
queasy note as it flitted out of the window. Indeed, the whole of
nature was uncertain, especially if disaster impended, and sometimes a
chicken would be born without the formality of an egg, or a bottomless
abyss spurted with gore under the dining-room table, or the wine began
to boil in the bottles, or a green frog leapt out of the sheepdog's
mouth.

So life was a little trying, a little perplexing; but it afforded wide
scope for curiosity, and Apuleius, an African, brought up in Athens, and
living in Rome, was endlessly curious. In his attraction to horrors, to
bloodshed, and the shudder of grisly phantoms there was, perhaps,
something of the man of peace. It is only the unwarlike citizen who
could delight in imagining a brigand nurtured from babyhood on human
blood. He was, indeed, writing in the very period which the historian
fixed upon as the happiest and most prosperous that the human race has
ever enjoyed--those two or three benign generations when, under the
Antonines, provincials combined with Romans in celebrating "the
increasing splendours of the cities, the beautiful face of the country,
cultivated and adorned like an immense garden, and the long festival of
peace, which was enjoyed by so many nations, forgetful of their ancient
animosities, and delivered from the apprehension of future danger." The
slow and secret poison that Gibbon says was introduced by the long peace
into the vitals of the Empire, was, perhaps, among the causes that
turned the thoughts of Apuleius to scenes of violence and terror--to the
"macabre," as Pater said--just as it touched his style with the
preciosity of decadence, and prompted him to occupy a page with rapture
over the "swift lightnings" flashed against the sunlight from women's
hair. He was, in fact, writing for citizens much like the English of
twenty years ago, when the interest of readers, protected from the harsh
realities of danger and anxiety, was flattered equally by bloodthirsty
slaughters, the shimmer of veiled radiance, and haunted byways for
access to the unknown gods.

Those by