sensualists, never visited by qualms of conscience, by headache, or
remorse, or debility, or wrinkles, or dyspepsia, however deep their
potations, however fiercely they indulged their appetites. Zeus, the
Grand Seignior or Sultan of Olympus and father of gods and men,
surpassed Turk and Mormon Elder in his uxoriousness and indiscriminate
concubinage. With Olympian goddess and lone terrestrial nymph and
deep-bosomed mortal lass of Hellas, the land of lovely women, as Homer
calls it, did he pursue his countless intrigues, which he sometimes had
the unblushing coolness and impudence to rehearse to his wedded wife,
Herè. His _list_ would have thrown Don Giovanni's entirely into the
shade. Herè, the queen of Olympus, called the Golden-Throned, the
Venerable, the Ox-Eyed, was a sort of celestial Queen Bess, the
undaunted she-Tudor, whose father, bluff Harry, was not a bad human
copy of Zeus himself, the Rejoicer in Thunder.

In that old Homeric heaven,--in those quiet seats of the gods of the
heroic world, which were never shaken by storm-wind, nor lashed by the
tempest that raved far below round the dwellings of wretched
mortals,--in those quiet abodes above the thunder, there was for the
most part nought but festal joy, music, choral dances, and emptying of
nectar-cups, interrupted now and then by descents into the low-lying
region of human life in quest of adventure, or on errands of divine
intervention in the affairs of men, for whom, on the whole, Zeus and
his court entertained sentiments of profound contempt. Once in a while
Zeus and all his courtiers went on a festal excursion to the land of
the blameless Ethiops, which lay somewhere over the ocean, where they
banqueted twelve days. Why such a special honor as this was shown to
these Ethiops is not explained. Within their borders were evidently the
summer resorts, Newport and Baden-Baden, frequented by the Olympians.
Only in great crises was the whole mythic host of the Grecian religion