tabernacles of Heine and of Lucian. But he was fallen on evil times
and evil tongues; while Lucian, as witty as he, as bitter in
mockery, as happily dowered with the magic of words, lived long and
happily and honoured, imprisoned in no "mattress-grave." Without
Rabelais, without Voltaire, without Heine, you would find, methinks,
even the joys of your Happy Islands lacking in zest; and, unless
Plato came by your way, none of the ancients could meet you in the
lists of sportive dialogue.

There, among the vines that bear twelve times in the year, more
excellent than all the vineyards of Touraine, while the song-birds
bring you flowers from vales enchanted, and the shapes of the
Blessed come and go, beautiful in wind-woven raiment of sunset hues;
there, in a land that knows not age, nor winter, midnight, nor
autumn, nor noon, where the silver twilight of summer-dawn is
perennial, where youth does not wax spectre-pale and die; there, my
Lucian, you are crowned the Prince of the Paradise of Mirth.

Who would bring you, if he had the power, from the banquet where
Homer sings: Homer, who, in mockery of commentators, past and to
come, German and Greek, informed you that he was by birth a
Babylonian? Yet, if you, who first wrote Dialogues of the Dead,
could hear the prayer of an epistle wafted to "lands indiscoverable
in the unheard-of West," you might visit once more a world so worthy
of such a mocker, so like the world you knew so well of old.

Ah, Lucian, we have need of you, of your sense and of your mockery!
Here, where faith is sick and superstition is waking afresh; where
gods come rarely, and spectres appear at five shillings an
interview; where science is popular, and philosophy cries aloud in