“Surely this is the most populous city of the
East! What a wilderness of people! what a jumble
of all ranks and ages! what a multiplicity of sects
and nations! what a variety of costumes! what a Babel
of languages! what a screaming of beasts! what a tinkling
of instruments! what a parcel of philosophers!”
Come let us be off.
“Stay a moment! I see a vast hubbub in
the hippodrome; what is the meaning of it, I beseech
you?”
That? — oh, nothing! The noble and
free citizens of Epidaphne being, as they declare,
well satisfied of the faith, valor, wisdom, and divinity
of their king, and having, moreover, been eye-witnesses
of his late superhuman agility, do think it no more
than their duty to invest his brows (in addition to
the poetic crown) with the wreath of victory in the
footrace — a wreath which it is evident
he must obtain at the celebration of the next Olympiad,
and which, therefore, they now give him in advance.
~~~ End of Text ~~~
Footnotes — Four Beasts
{*1} Flavius Vospicus says, that the hymn here introduced
was sung by the rabble upon the occasion of Aurelian,
in the Sarmatic war, having slain, with his own hand,
nine hundred and fifty of the enemy.
==========
What song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed
when he hid himself among women, although puzzling
questions, are not beyond all conjecture.
—Sir
Thomas Browne.
The mental features discoursed of as the analytical,
are, in themselves, but little susceptible of analysis.
We appreciate them only in their effects. We
know of them, among other things, that they are always
to their possessor, when inordinately possessed, a
source of the liveliest enjoyment. As the strong
man exults in his physical ability, delighting in
such exercises as call his muscles into action, so
glories the analyst in that moral activity which disentangles.
He derives pleasure from even the most trivial occupations
bringing his talent into play. He is fond of enigmas,
of conundrums, of hieroglyphics; exhibiting in his
solutions of each a degree of acumen which
appears to the ordinary apprehension præternatural.
His results, brought about by the very soul and essence
of method, have, in truth, the whole air of intuition.
The faculty of re-solution is possibly much invigorated
by mathematical study, and especially by that highest
branch of it which, unjustly, and merely on account
of its retrograde operations, has been called, as
if par excellence, analysis. Yet to calculate
is not in itself to analyse. A chess-player, for
example, does the one without effort at the other.
It follows that the game of chess, in its effects
upon mental character, is greatly misunderstood.
I am not now writing a treatise, but simply prefacing
a somewhat peculiar narrative by observations very
