ways to unknown gods were much affected by Apuleius himself. The
world was at the slack, waiting, as it were, for the next tide to flow,
and seldom has religion been so powerless or religions so many. Of one
abandoned woman it is told as the climax of her other wickednesses that
she blasphemously proclaimed her belief in one god only. Apuleius seems
to have been initiated into every cult of religious mystery, and in his
story he exultingly shows us the dog-faced gods of Egypt triumphing on
the soil that Apollo and Athene had blessed. Here was Anubis, their
messenger, and unconquered Osiris, supreme father of gods, and another
whose emblem no mortal tongue might expound. So it came that at the
great procession of Isis through a Greek city the ass was at last able,
after unutterable sufferings, to devour the chaplet of roses destined to
restore him to human shape; and thereupon he took the vows of chastity
and abstinence (so difficult for him to observe) until at length he was
worthy to be initiated into the mysteries of the goddess, and, in his
own words, "drew nigh to the confines of death, trod the threshold of
Proserpine, was borne through all the elements, and returned to earth
again, saw the sun gleaming with bright splendour at dead of night,
approached the gods above and the gods below, and worshipped them face
to face."

It was this redemption by roses, and the initiation into virtue's path,
that caused Adlington in his introduction to call the book "a figure of
man's life, egging mortal men forward from their asinal form to their
human and perfect shape, that so they might take a pattern to regenerate
their lives from brutish and beastly custom," And, indeed, the book is,
in a wider sense, the figure of man's life, for almost alone among the
writings of antiquity it reveals to us every phase of that dim
underworld which persists, as we have supposed, almost unnoticed and
unchanged from one generation of man to another, and takes little
account either of government, the arts, or the other interests of
intellectual classes. It is a world of incessant toil and primitive
passion, yet laughter has place in it, and Apuleius shows us how two
slave cooks could laugh as they peered through a chink at their ass
carefully selecting the choicest dainties from the table; and how the
whole populace of a country town roared with delight at the trial of a
man who thought he had killed three thieves, but had really pierced
three