yrtle, but sparkling still, and flouting the slovenly art
of modern workmen. Is it sewers, aqueducts, viaducts?

"Why, we have lost the art of making a road--lost it with the world's
greatest models under our very eye. Is it sepulchres of the dead? Why,
no Christian nation has ever erected a tomb, the sight of which does not
set a scholar laughing. Do but think of the Mausoleum, and the Pyramids,
and the monstrous sepulchres of the Indus and Ganges, which outside are
mountains, and within are mines of precious stones. Ah, you have not
seen the East, Jerome, or you could not decry the heathen."

Jerome observed that these were mere material things. True greatness was
in the soul.

"Well then," replied Colonna, "in the world of mind, what have we
discovered? Is it geometry? Is it logic? Nay, we are all pupils of
Euclid and Aristotle. Is it written characters, an invention almost
divine? We no more invented it than Cadmus did. Is it poetry? Homer hath
never been approached by us, nor hath Virgil, nor Horace. Is it tragedy
or comedy? Why, poets, actors, theatres, all fell to dust at our
touch. Have we succeeded in reviving them? Would you compare our little
miserable mysteries and moralities, all frigid personification, and dog
Latin, with the glories of a Greek play (on the decoration of which
a hundred thousand crowns had been spent) performed inside a marble
miracle, the audience a seated city, and the poet a Sophocles?

"What then have we invented? Is it monotheism? Why, the learned and
philosophical among the Greeks and Romans held it; even their more
enlightened poets were monotheists in their sleeves.

{Zeus estin ouranos, Zeus te gy Zeus toi panta}
saith the Greek, and Lucan echoes him:
'Jupiter est quod cunque vides quo cunque moveris.'

"Their vulgar were polytheists; and what are ours? We have not invented
'invocation of the saints.' Our sancti answers to their Daemones and
Divi, and the heathen used to pray their Divi or deified mortal to
intercede with the higher divinity; but the ruder minds among them,
incapable of nice distinctions, worshipped those lesser gods they should
have but invoked. And so do the mob of Christians in our day, following
the heathen vulgar or by unbroken tradition. For in holy writ is no
polytheism of any sort or kind.

"We have not invented so much as a form or variety of polytheism. The
pagan vulgar worshipped all sorts of deified mortals, and each had his
favo