they are quite unaltered. Still our Peregrinus, and our Peregrina
too, come to us from the East, or, if from the West, they take India
on their way--India, that secular home of drivelling creeds, and of
religion in its sacerdotage. Still they prattle of Brahmins and
Buddhism; though, unlike Peregrinus, they do not publicly burn
themselves on pyres, at Epsom Downs, after the Derby. We are not so
fortunate in the demise of our Theosophists; and our police, less
wise than the Hellenodicae, would probably not permit the Immolation
of the Quack. Like your Alexander, they deal in marvels and
miracles, oracles and warnings. All such bogy stories as those of
your "Philopseudes," and the ghost of the lady who took to table-
rapping because one of her best slippers had not been burned with
her body, are gravely investigated by the Psychical Society.

Even your ignorant Bibliophile is still with us--the man without a
tinge of letters, who buys up old manuscripts "because they are
stained and gnawed, and who goes, for proof of valued antiquity, to
the testimony of the book-worms." And the rich Bibliophile now, as
in your satire, clothes his volumes in purple morocco and gay
dorures, while their contents are sealed to him.

As to the topics of satire and gay curiosity which occupy the lady
known as "Gyp," and M. Halevy in his "Les Petites Cardinal," if you
had not exhausted the matter in your "Dialogues of Hetairai," you
would be amused to find the same old traits surviving without a
touch of change. One reads, in Halevy's French, of Madame Cardinal,
and, in your Greek, of the mother of Philinna, and marvels that
eighteen hundred years have not in one single trifle altered the
mould. Still the old shabby light-loves, the old greed, the old
luxury and squalor. Still the unconquerable superstition that now