Translations' edition by W.E. Henley, of _The Golden Ass of Apuleius_,
published by David Nutt, London, 1893. All other quotations bearing
upon Apuleius are taken from the same source.]

_An indefatigable youthfulness_ was also the prime distinction of the
Elizabethan era's writings and doings; it was fitting that such a
period should have witnessed the first translation into the English
language of this Benjamin of a classic literature's old age.

Apuleius was an unconventional cosmopolitan in that ancient world
which he so vividly portrays; he was a barbarian by birth, a Greek by
education, and wrote his book in the Romans' language. In his use
of luminous slang for literary purposes he was Rudyard Kipling's
prototype.

"He would twist the vulgar words of every-day into quaint unheard-of
meanings, nor did he deny shelter to those loafers and footpads of
speech which inspire the grammarian with horror. On every page you
encounter a proverb, a catchword, a literary allusion, a flagrant
redundancy. One quality only was distasteful to him--the commonplace."

There are other respects in which we can trace Mr. Kipling's likeness:
in his youthful precocity--he was twenty-five when he wrote his
_Metamorphoses_; in his daring as an innovator; in his manly
stalwartness in dealing with the calamities of life; in his
adventurous note of world-wideness and realistic method of handling
the improbable and uncanny.

Like all great artists, he was a skilful borrower from the literary
achievements of a bygone age; and so successfully does he borrow that