Ever afterwards Musagetes used to be heard laughing immoderately, even for a librarian to the then House of Lords.  Jupiter, incensed at this irregularity, paid him a surprise visit one day in order to discover the cause.  He stayed, however, quite a long time; and the other deities soon contracted the habit of taking their nectar into the library.  With the decline of manners, the twelfth muse began to be invited to dessert, after Juno and the more reputable goddesses had retired.  To cut a long story short, when Pan died, in the Olympian sense very shortly afterwards, all the gods, as we know, took refuge on earth.  Jupiter retired to Iceland, Aphrodite to Germany, Apollo to Picardy, but the twelfth muse wandered all over Europe, and found that she was really more appreciated than her sisters.  The castle, the abbey, the inn, the lone ale-house on the Berkshire moors, all made her welcome.  Finally she settled in Ireland, where, according to a protestant libel, she took the black veil in a nunnery.

She is older than the chestnuts of Vallombrosa.  Perhaps of all the ancient goddesses time has chilled her least.  Her unfathomable smile wears a touch of something sinister in it, but she has a new meaning for every generation.  And yet for Aretino there was some further magic of crimson on her lips and cheeks, lost for us.  She is a solecism for the convalescent, and has given consolation to the brave.  She has been a diver in rather deep seas and a climber in somewhat steep places.  Her censers are the smoking-rooms of clubs; and her presence-lamps are schoolboys’ lanterns.  Though held the friend of liars and brutes, she has lived on the indelicacies of kings, and has made even pontiffs laugh.  Her mysteries are told in the night-time, and in low whispers to the garish day.  She lingers over the stable-yard (no doubt called mews for that reason).  Her costly breviaries, embellished with strange illuminations, are prohibited under Lord Campbell’s Act.  Stars mark the places where she has been.  Sometimes a scholar’s fallacy, a sworn foe to Dr. Bowdler, she is Notre Dame de Milet, our Lady of Limerick.

* * * * *

But it is of her sister I would speak, the thirteenth sister, who was created to keep the eleventh in countenance.  She presides over the absurdities of prose.  She is responsible for the stylistic flights of Pegasus when, owing to the persuasive eloquence of the Hon. Stephen Coleridge, his bearing-rein has been abolished, and he kicks over the traces.

It was the Elethian Muse who inspired that Oxford undergraduate’s peroration to his essay on the Characteristics of St. John’s Gospel—­

   ’Furthermore, we may add that St. John’s Gospel is characterised by a
   tone of fervent piety which is totally wanting in those of the other
   Evangelists’—­

and she hovered over the journalist who, writing for a paper which we need not name, referred to Bacchus as