meddle with the old woman's appliances. "Be you my Venus," he says
to the pretty maid-servant who has introduced him to the view of
Pamphile, "and let me stand by you a winged Cupid!" and, freely
applying the magic ointment, sees himself transformed, "not into a
bird, but into an ass!"

Well! the proper remedy for his distress is a supper of roses, could
such be found, and many are his quaintly picturesque attempts to come
by them at that adverse season; as he contrives to do at last, when,
the grotesque procession of Isis [60] passing by with a bear and
other strange animals in its train, the ass following along with the
rest suddenly crunches the chaplet of roses carried in the High-
priest's hand.

Meantime, however, he must wait for the spring, with more than the
outside of an ass; "though I was not so much a fool, nor so truly an
ass," he tells us, when he happens to be left alone with a daintily
spread table, "as to neglect this most delicious fare, and feed upon
coarse hay." For, in truth, all through the book, there is an
unmistakably real feeling for asses, with bold touches like Swift's,
and a genuine animal breadth. Lucius was the original ass, who
peeping slily from the window of his hiding-place forgot all about
the big shade he cast just above him, and gave occasion to the joke
or proverb about "the peeping ass and his shadow."

But the marvellous, delight in which is one of the really serious
elements in most boys, passed at times, those young readers still
feeling its fascination, into what French writers call the macabre--
that species of almost insane pre-occupation with the materialities
of our mouldering flesh, that luxury of disgust in gazing on