ars out of
mere sport, and abuse of language."

He then went through the prime jewels, illustrating their moral
properties, especially of the ruby, the sapphire, the emerald, and the
opal, by anecdotes out of grave historians.

"These be old wives' fables," said Jerome contemptuously. "Was ever such
credulity as thine?"

Now credulity is a reproach sceptics have often the ill-luck to incur;
but it mortifies them none the less for that.

The believer in stones writhed under it, and dropped the subject. Then
Jerome, mistaking his silence, exhorted him to go a step farther, and
give up from this day his vain pagan lore, and study the lives of the
saints. "Blot out these heathen superstitions from thy mind, brother, as
Christianity hath blotted them from the earth."

And in this strain he proceeded, repeating, incautiously, some current
but loose theological statements. Then the smarting Polifilo revenged
himself. He flew out, and hurled a mountain of crude, miscellaneous
lore upon Jerome, of which, partly for want of time, partly for lack of
learning, I can reproduce but a few fragments.

"The heathen blotted out? Why, they hold four-fifths of the world. And
what have we Christians invented without their aid? painting? sculpture?
these are heathen arts, and we but pigmies at them. What modern mind
can conceive and grave so god-like forms as did the chief Athenian
sculptors, and the Libyan Licas, and Dinocrates of Macedon, and Scopas,
Timotheus, Leochares, and Briaxis; Chares, Lysippus, and the immortal
three of Rhodes, that wrought Laocoon from a single block? What prince
hath the genius to turn mountains into statues, as was done at Bagistan,
and projected at Athos? What town the soul to plant a colossus of brass
in the sea, for the tallest ships to sail in and out between his legs?
Is it architecture we have invented? Why, here too we are but children.
Can we match for pure design the Parthenon, with its clusters of double
and single Doric columns? (I do adore the Doric when the scale is
large), and for grandeur and finish, the theatres of Greece and Rome,
or the prodigious temples of Egypt, up to whose portals men walked
awe-struck through avenues a mile long of sphinxes, each as big as a
Venetian palace. And all these prodigies of porphyry cut and polished
like crystal, not rough hewn as in our puny structures. Even now their
polished columns and pilasters lie o'erthrown and broken, o'ergrown with
acanthus and m