With all the sincerity of Lucian in _The True History_, 'soliciting his
reader's incredulity,' we solicit our reader's neglect of this
appreciation. We have no pretensions whatever to the critical faculty;
the following remarks are to be taken as made with diffidence, and
offered to those only who prefer being told what to like, and why, to
settling the matter for themselves.
Goethe, aged fourteen, with seven languages on hand, devised the plan
of a correspondence kept up by seven imaginary brothers scattered over
the globe, each writing in the language of his adopted land. The
stay-at-home in Frankfort was to write Jew-German, for which purpose
some Hebrew must be acquired. His father sent him to Rector Albrecht.
The rector was always found with one book open before him—a
well-thumbed Lucian. But the Hebrew vowel-points were perplexing, and
the boy found better amusement in putting shrewd questions on what
struck him as impossibilities or inconsistencies in the Old-Testament
narrative they were reading. The old gentleman was infinitely amused,
had fits of mingled coughing and laughter, but made little attempt at
solving his pupil's difficulties, beyond ejaculating _Er narrischer
Kerl! Er narrischer Junge_! He let him dig for solutions, however, in
an English commentary on the shelves, and occupied the time with
turning the familiar pages of his Lucian [Footnote: _Wahrheit und
Dichtung_, book iv. ]. The wicked old rector perhaps chuckled to think
that here was one who bade fair to love Lucian one day as well as he
did himself.
For Lucian too was one who asked questions—spent his life doing little
else; if one were invited to draw him with the least possible
expenditure of ink, one's pen would trace a mark of interrogation. That
picture is easily drawn; to put life into it is a more difficult
matter. However, his is not a complex character, for all the irony in
which he sometimes chooses to clothe his thought; and materials are at
least abundant; he is one of the self-revealing fraternity; his own
personal presence is to be detected more often than not in his work. He
may give us the assistance, or he may not, of labelling a character
_Lucian_ or _Lycinus_; we can detect him, _volentes volentem_, under
the thin disguise of _Menippus_ or _Tychiades_ or _Cyniscus_ as well.
And the essence of him as he reveals himself is the questioning spirit.
He has no respect for authority. Burke describes the majority of
mankind, who do not form their own opinions, as 'those whom Providence
has doomed to live on trust'; Lucian entirely refuses to live on trust;
he 'wants to know.' It was the wish of _Arthur Clennam_, who had in
consequence a very bad name among the _Tite Barnacles_ and other
persons in authority. Lucian has not escaped the same fate; 'the
scoffer Lucian' has become as much a commonplace as '_fidus Achates_,'
or 'the well-greaved Achaeans,' the reading of him has been
discountenanced, and, if he has not actually lost his place at the
table of Immortals, promised him when he temporarily left the Island of
the Blest, it has not been so 'distinguished' a place as it was to have
been and should have been. And all because he 'wanted to know.'
His questions, of course, are not all put in the same manner. In the
_Dialogues of the Gods_, for instance, the mark of interrogation is not
writ large; they have almost the air at first of little stories in
dialogue form, which might serve to instruct schoolboys in the
attributes and legends of the gods—a manual charmingly done, yet a
manual only. But we soon see that he has said to himself: Let us put
the thing into plain natural prose, and see what it looks like with its
glamour of poetry and reverence stripped off; the Gods do human things;
why not represent them as human persons, and see what results? What did
result was that henceforth any one who still believed in the pagan
deities might at the cost of an hour's light reading satisfy himself
that his gods were not gods, or, if they were, had no business to be.
Whether many or few did so read and so satisfy themselves, we have no
means of knowing; it is easy to over-estimate the effect such writing
may have had, and to forget that those who were capable of being
convinced by exposition of this sort would mostly be those who were
already convinced without; still, so far as Lucian had any effect on
the religious position, it must have been in discrediting paganism and
increasing the readiness to accept the new faith beginning to make its
way. Which being so, it was ungrateful of the Christian church to turn
and rend him. It did so, partly in error. Lucian had referred in the
_Life of Peregrine_ to the Christians, in words which might seem
irreverent to Christians at a time when they were no longer an obscure
sect; he had described and ridiculed in _The Liar_ certain 'Syrian'
miracles which have a remarkable likeness to the casting out of spirits
by Christ and the apostles; and worse still, the _Philopatris_ passed
under his name. This dialogue, unlike what Lucian had written in the
_Peregrine_ and _The Liar_, is a deliberate attack on Christianity. It
is clear to us now that it was written two hundred years after his
time, under Julian the Apostate; but there can be no more doubt of its
being an imitation of Lucian than of its not being his; it consequently
passed for his, the story gained currency that he was an apostate
himself, and his name was anathema for the church. It was only partly
in error, however. Though Lucian might be useful on occasion ('When
Tertullian or Lactantius employ their labours in exposing the falsehood
and extravagance of Paganism, they are obliged to transcribe the
eloquence of Cicero or the wit of Lucian' [Footnote: Gibbon, _Decline
and Fall_, cap. xv.]), the very word heretic is enough to remind us
that the Church could not show much favour to one who insisted always
on thinking for himself. His works survived, but he was not read,
through the Middle Ages. With the Renaissance he partly came into his
own again, but still laboured under the imputations of scoffing and
atheism, which confined the reading of him to the few.
The method followed in the _Dialogues of the Gods_ and similar pieces
is a very indirect way of putting questions. It is done much more
directly in others, the _Zeus cross-examined_, for instance. Since the
fallen angels
reasoned high
Of Providence, Foreknowledge, Will, and Fate—
Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute—
And found no end, in wandering mazes lost,
these subjects have had their share of attention; but the questions can
hardly be put more directly, or more neatly, than in the _Zeus
cross-examined_, and the thirtieth _Dialogue of the Dead_.
He has many other interrogative methods besides these, which may be
left to reveal themselves in the course of reading. As for answering
questions, that is another matter. The answer is sometimes apparent,
sometimes not; he will not refrain from asking a question just because
he does not know the answer; his _role_ is asking, not answering. Nor
when he gives an answer is it always certain whether it is to be taken
in earnest. Was he a cynic? one would say so after reading _The Cynic_;
was he an Epicurean? one would say so after reading the _Alexander_;
was he a philosopher? one would say Yes at a certain point of the
_Hermotimus_, No at another. He doubtless had his moods, and he was
quite unhampered by desire for any consistency except consistent
independence of judgement. Moreover, the difficulty of getting at his
real opinions is increased by the fact that he was an ironist. We have
called him a self-revealer; but you never quite know where to have an
ironical self-revealer. Goethe has the useful phrase, 'direct irony'; a
certain German writer 'makes too free a use of direct irony, praising
the blameworthy and blaming the praiseworthy—a rhetorical device which
should be very sparingly employed. In the long run it disgusts the
sensible and misleads the dull, pleasing only the great intermediate
class to whom it offers the satisfaction of being able to think
themselves more shrewd than other people, without expending much
thought of their own' (_Wahrheit und Dichtung_, book vii). Fielding
gives us in _Jonathan Wild_ a sustained piece of 'direct irony'; you
have only to reverse everything said, and you get the author's meaning.
Lucian's irony is not of that sort; you cannot tell when you are to
reverse him, only that you will have sometimes to do so. He does use
the direct kind; _The Rhetorician's Vade mecum_ and _The Parasite_ are
examples; the latter is also an example (unless a translator, who is
condemned not to skip or skim, is an unfair judge) of how tiresome it
may become. But who shall say how much of irony and how much of genuine
feeling there is in the fine description of the philosophic State given
in the _Hermotimus_ (with its suggestions of _Christian_ in _The
Pilgrim's Progress_, and of the 'not many wise men after the flesh, not
many mighty, not many noble'), or in the whimsical extravagance (as it
strikes a modern) of the _Pantomime_, or in the triumph permitted to
the Cynic (against 'Lycinus' too) in the dialogue called after him? In
one of his own introductory lectures he compares his pieces aptly
enough to the bacchante's thyrsus with its steel point concealed.
With his questions and his irony and his inconsistencies, it is no
wonder that Lucian is accused of being purely negative and destructive.
But we need not think he is disposed of in that way, any more than our
old-fashioned literary education is disposed of when it has been
pointed out that it does not equip its _alumni_ with knowledge of
electricity or of a commercially useful modern language; it may have
equipped them with something less paying, but more worth paying for.
Lucian, it is certain, will supply no one with a religion or a
philosophy; but it may be doubted whether any writer will supply more
fully both example and precept in favour of doing one's thinking for
oneself; and it may be doubted also whether any other intellectual
lesson is more necessary. He is _nullius addictus iurare in verba
magistri_, if ever man was; he is individualist to the core. No
religion or philosophy, he seems to say, will save you; the thing is to
think for yourself, and be a man of sense. 'It was but small
consolation,' says _Menippus_, 'to reflect that I was in numerous and
wise and eminently sensible company, if I was a fool still, all astray
in my quest for truth.' _Vox populi_ is no _vox dei_ for him; he is
quite proof against majorities; _Athanasius contra mundum_ is more to
his taste. "What is this I hear?" asked Arignotus, scowling upon me;
"you deny the existence of the supernatural, when there is scarcely a
man who has not seen some evidence of it?" "Therein lies my
exculpation," I replied; "I do not believe in the supernatural,
because, unlike the rest of mankind, I do not see it; if I saw, I
should doubtless believe, just as you all do."' That British schoolboys
should have been brought up for centuries on Ovid, and Lucian have been
tabooed, is, in view of their comparative efficacy in stimulating
thought, an interesting example of _habent sua fata libelli_.
It need not be denied that there is in him a certain lack of feeling,
not surprising in one of his analytic temper, but not agreeable either.
He is a hard bright intelligence, with no bowels; he applies the knife
without the least compunction—indeed with something of savage
enjoyment. The veil is relentlessly torn from family affection in the
_Mourning_. _Solon_ in the _Charon_ pursues his victory so far as to
make us pity instead of scorning _Croesus_. _Menippus_ and his kind, in
the shades, do their lashing of dead horses with a disagreeable gusto,
which tempts us to raise a society for the prevention of cruelty to the
Damned. A voyage through Lucian in search of pathos will yield as
little result as one in search of interest in nature. There is a touch
of it here and there (which has probably evaporated in translation) in
the _Hermotimus_, the _Demonax_, and the _Demosthenes_; but that is
all. He was perhaps not unconscious of all this himself. 'But what is
your profession?' asks _Philosophy_. 'I profess hatred of imposture and
pretension, lying and pride… However, I do not neglect the
complementary branch, in which love takes the place of hate; it
includes love of truth and beauty and simplicity, and all that is akin
to love. _But the subjects for this branch of the profession are sadly
few_.'
Before going on to his purely literary qualities, we may collect here a
few detached remarks affecting rather his character than his skill as
an artist. And first of his relations to philosophy. The statements in
the _Menippus_ and the _Icaromenippus_, as well as in _The Fisher_ and
_The double Indictment_, have all the air of autobiography (especially
as they are in the nature of digressions), and give us to understand
that he had spent much time and energy on philosophic study. He claims
_Philosophy_ as his mistress in _The Fisher_, and in a case where he is
in fact judge as well as party, has no difficulty in getting his claim
established. He is for ever reminding us that he loves philosophy and
only satirizes the degenerate philosophers of his day. But it _will_
occur to us after reading him through that he has dissembled his love,
then, very well. There is not a passage from beginning to end of his
works that indicates any real comprehension of any philosophic system.
The external characteristics of the philosophers, the absurd stories
current about them, and the popular misrepresentations of their
doctrines—it is in these that philosophy consists for him. That he had
read some of them there is no doubt; but one has an uneasy suspicion
that he read Plato because he liked his humour and his style, and did
not trouble himself about anything further. Gibbon speaks of 'the
philosophic maze of the writings of Plato, of which the dramatic is
perhaps more interesting than the argumentative part.' That is quite a
legitimate opinion, provided you do not undertake to judge philosophy
in the light of it. The apparently serious rejection of geometrical
truth in the _Hermotimus_ may fairly suggest that Lucian was as
unphilosophic as he was unmathematical. Twice, and perhaps twice only,
does he express hearty admiration for a philosopher. Demonax is 'the
best of all philosophers'; but then he admired him just because he was
so little of a philosopher and so much a man of ordinary common sense.
And Epicurus is 'the thinker who had grasped the nature of things and
been in solitary possession of truth'; but then that is in the
_Alexander_, and any stick was good enough to beat that dog with. The
fact is, Lucian was much too well satisfied with his own judgement to
think that he could possibly require guidance, and the commonplace test
of results was enough to assure him that philosophy was worthless: 'It
is no use having all theory at your fingers' ends, if you do not
conform your conduct to the right.' There is a description in the
_Pantomime_ that is perhaps truer than it is meant to pass for.
'Lycinus' is called 'an educated man, and _in some sort_ a student of
philosophy.'
If he is not a philosopher, he is very much a moralist; it is because
philosophy deals partly with morals that he thinks he cares for it. But
here too his conclusions are of a very commonsense order. The Stoic
notion that 'Virtue consists in being uncomfortable' strikes him as
merely absurd; no asceticism for him; on the other hand, no lavish
extravagance and _Persici apparatus_; a dinner of herbs with the
righteous—that is, the cultivated Athenian—, a neat repast of Attic
taste, is honestly his idea of good living; it is probable that he
really did sacrifice both money and fame to live in Athens rather than
in Rome, according to his own ideal. That ideal is a very modest one;
when _Menippus_ took all the trouble to get down to Tiresias in Hades
via Babylon, his reward was the information that 'the life of the
ordinary man is the best and the most prudent choice.' So thought
Lucian; and it is to be counted to him for righteousness that he
decided to abandon 'the odious practices that his profession imposes on
the advocate—deceit, falsehood, bluster, clamour, pushing,' for the
quiet life of a literary man (especially as we should probably never
have heard his name had he done otherwise). Not that the life was so
quiet as it might have been. He could not keep his satire impersonal
enough to avoid incurring enmities. He boasts in the _Peregrine_ of the
unfeeling way in which he commented on that enthusiast to his
followers, and we may believe his assurance that his writings brought
general dislike and danger upon him. His moralizing (of which we are
happy to say there is a great deal) is based on Tiresias's
pronouncement. Moralizing has a bad name; but than good moralizing
there is, when one has reached a certain age perhaps, no better
reading. Some of us like it even in our novels, feel more at home with
Fielding and Thackeray for it, and regretfully confess ourselves
unequal to the artistic aloofness of a Flaubert. Well, Lucian's
moralizings are, for those who like such things, of the right quality;
they are never dull, and the touch is extremely light. We may perhaps
be pardoned for alluding to half a dozen conceptions that have a
specially modern air about them. The use that Rome may serve as a
school of resistance to temptation (_Nigrinus_, 19) recalls Milton's
'fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never
sallies out and seeks her adversary.' 'Old age is wisdom's youth, the
day of her glorious flower' (_Heracles_, 8) might have stood as a text
for Browning's _Rabbi ben Ezra_. The brands visible on the tyrant's
soul, and the refusal of Lethe as a sufficient punishment (_Voyage to
the lower World_, 24 and 28), have their parallels in our new
eschatology. The decision of _Zeus_ that _Heraclitus_ and _Democritus_
are to be one lot that laughter and tears will go together (_Sale of
Creeds_, l3)—accords with our views of the emotional temperament.
_Chiron_ is impressive on the vanity of fruition (_Dialogues of the
Dead_, 26). And the figuring of _Truth_ as 'the shadowy creature with
the indefinite complexion' (_The Fisher_, 16) is only one example of
Lucian's felicity in allegory.
Another weak point, for which many people will have no more inclination
to condemn him than for his moralizing, is his absolute indifference to
the beauties of nature. Having already given him credit for regarding
nothing that is human as beyond his province, it is our duty to record
the corresponding limitation; of everything that was not human he was
simply unconscious; with him it was not so much that the _proper_ as
that the _only_ study of mankind is man. The apparent exceptions are
not real ones. If he is interested in the gods, it is as the creatures
of human folly that he takes them to be. If he writes a toy essay with
much parade of close observation on the fly, it is to show how amusing
human ingenuity can be on an unlikely subject. But it is worth notice
that 'the first of the moderns,' though he shows himself in many
descriptions of pictures quite awake to the beauty manufactured by man,
has in no way anticipated the modern discovery that nature is
beautiful. To readers who have had enough of the pathetic fallacy, and
of the second-rate novelist's local colour, Lucian's tacit assumption
that there is nothing but man is refreshing. That he was a close enough
observer of human nature, any one can satisfy himself by glancing at
the _Feast of Lapithae_, the _Dialogues of the Hetaerae_, some of the
_Dialogues of the Gods_, and perhaps best of all, _The Liar_.
As it occurs to himself to repel the imputation of plagiarism in _A
literary Prometheus_, the point must be briefly touched upon. There is
no doubt that Homer preceded him in making the gods extremely, even
comically, human, that Plato showed him an example of prose dialogue,
that Aristophanes inspired his constructive fancy, that Menippus
provided him with some ideas, how far developed on the same lines we
cannot now tell, that Menander's comedies and Herodas's mimes
contributed to the absolute naturalness of his conversation. If any, or
almost any, of these had never existed, Lucian would have been more or
less different from what he is. His originality is not in the least
affected by that; we may resolve him theoretically into his elements;
but he too had the gift, that out of three sounds he framed, not a
fourth sound, but a star. The question of his originality is no more
important—indeed much less so—than that of Sterne's.
When we pass to purely literary matters, the first thing to be remarked
upon is the linguistic miracle presented to us. It is useless to dwell
upon it in detail, since this is an introduction not to Lucian, but to
a translation of Lucian; it exists, none the less. A Syrian writes in
Greek, and not in the Greek of his own time, but in that of five or six
centuries before, and he does it, if not with absolute correctness, yet
with the easy mastery that we expect only from one in a million of
those who write in their mother tongue, and takes his place as an
immortal classic. The miracle may be repeated; an English-educated
Hindu may produce masterpieces of Elizabethan English that will rank
him with Bacon and Ben Jonson; but it will surprise us, when it does
happen. That Lucian was himself aware of the awful dangers besetting
the writer who would revive an obsolete fashion of speech is shown in
the _Lexiphanes_.
Some faults of style he undoubtedly has, of which a word or two should
perhaps be said. The first is the general taint of rhetoric, which is
sometimes positively intolerable, and is liable to spoil enjoyment even
of the best pieces occasionally. Were it not that 'Rhetoric made a
Greek of me,' we should wish heartily that he had never been a
rhetorician. It is the practice of talking on unreal cases, doubtless
habitual with him up to forty, that must be responsible for the
self-satisfied fluency, the too great length, and the perverse
ingenuity, that sometimes excite our impatience. Naturally, it is in
the pieces of inferior subject or design that this taint is most
perceptible; and it must be forgiven in consideration of the fact that
without the toilsome study of rhetoric he would not have been the
master of Greek that he was.
The second is perhaps only a special case of the first. Julius Pollux,
a sophist whom Lucian is supposed to have attacked in _The
Rhetorician's Vade mecum_, is best known as author of an _Onomasticon_,
or word-list, containing the most important words relating to certain
subjects. One would be reluctant to believe that Lucian condescended to
use his enemy's manual; but it is hard to think that he had not one of
his own, of which he made much too good use. The conviction is
constantly forced on a translator that when Lucian has said a thing
sufficiently once, he has looked at his Onomasticon, found that there
are some words he has not yet got in, and forthwith said the thing
again with some of them, and yet again with the rest.
The third concerns his use of illustrative anecdotes, comparisons, and
phrases. It is true that, if his pieces are taken each separately, he
is most happy with all these (though it is hard to forgive Alexander's
bathe in the Cydnus with which _The Hall_ opens); but when they are
read continuously, the repeated appearances of the tragic actor
disrobed, the dancing apes and their nuts, of Zeus's golden cord, and
of the 'two octaves apart,' produce an impression of poverty that makes
us momentarily forget his real wealth.
We have spoken of the annoying tendency to pleonasm in Lucian's style,
which must be laid at the door of rhetoric. On the other hand let it
have part of the credit for a thing of vastly more importance, his
choice of dialogue as a form when he took to letters. It is quite
obvious that he was naturally a man of detached mind, with an
inclination for looking at both sides of a question. This was no doubt
strengthened by the common practice among professional rhetoricians of
writing speeches on both sides of imaginary cases. The level-headedness
produced by this combination of nature and training naturally led to
the selection of dialogue. In one of the preliminary trials of _The
double Indictment, Drink_, being one of the parties, and consciously
incapable at the moment of doing herself justice, employs her opponent,
_The Academy_, to plead for as well as against her. There are a good
many pieces in which Lucian follows the same method. In _The Hall_ the
legal form is actually kept; in the _Peregrine_ speeches are delivered
by an admirer and a scorner of the hero; in _The Rhetorician's Vade
mecum_ half the piece is an imaginary statement of the writer's enemy;
in the _Apology for 'The dependent Scholar'_ there is a long imaginary
objection set up to be afterwards disposed of; the _Saturnalian
Letters_ are the cases of rich and poor put from opposite sides. None
of these are dialogues; but they are all less perfect devices to secure
the same object, the putting of the two views that the man of detached
mind recognizes on every question. Not that justice is always the
object; these devices, and dialogue still more, offer the further
advantage of economy; no ideas need be wasted, if the subject is
treated from more than one aspect. The choice of dialogue may be
accounted for thus; it is true that it would not have availed much if
the chooser had not possessed the nimble wit and the endless power of
varying the formula which is so astonishing in Lucian; but that it was
a matter of importance is proved at once by comparing the _Alexander_
with _The Liar_, or _The dependent Scholar_ with the _Feast of
Lapithae_. Lucian's non-dialogue pieces (with the exception of _The
True History_) might have been written by other people; the dialogues
are all his own.
About five-and-thirty of his pieces (or sets of pieces) are in
dialogue, and perhaps the greatest proof of his artistic skill is that
the form never palls; so great is the variety of treatment that no one
of them is like another. The point may be worth dwelling on a little.
The main differences between dialogues, apart from the particular
writer's characteristics, are these: the persons may be two only, or
more; they may be well or ill-matched; the proportions and relations
between conversation and narrative vary; and the objects in view are
not always the same. It is natural for a writer to fall into a groove
with some or all of these, and produce an effect of sameness. Lucian,
on the contrary, so rings the changes by permutations and combinations
of them that each dialogue is approached with a delightful uncertainty
of what form it may take. As to number of persons, it is a long step
from the _Menippus_ to the crowded _dramatis personae_ of _The Fisher_
or the _Zeus Tragoedus_, in the latter of which there are two
independent sets, one overhearing and commenting upon the other. It is
not much less, though of another kind, from _The Parasite_, where the
interlocutor is merely a man of straw, to the _Hermotimus_, where he
has life enough to give us ever fresh hopes of a change in fortune, or
to the _Anacharsis_, where we are not quite sure, even when all is
over, which has had the best. Then if we consider conversation and
narrative, there are all kinds. _Nigrinus_ has narrative in a setting
of dialogue, _Demosthenes_ vice versa, _The Liar_ reported dialogue
inside dialogue; _Icaromenippus_ is almost a narrative, while _The
Runaways_ is almost a play. Lastly, the form serves in the _Toxaris_ as
a vehicle for stories, in the _Hermotimus_ for real discussion, in
_Menippus_ as relief for narrative, in the _Portrait-study_ for
description, in _The Cock_ to convey moralizing, in _The double
Indictment_ autobiography, in the _Lexiphanes_ satire, and in the short
series it enshrines prose idylls.
These are considerations of a mechanical order, perhaps; it may be
admitted that technical skill of this sort is only valuable in giving a
proper chance to more essential gifts; but when those exist, it is of
the highest value. And Lucian's versatility in technique is only a
symbol of his versatile powers in general. He is equally at home in
heaven and earth and hell, with philosophers and cobblers, telling a
story, criticizing a book, describing a picture, elaborating an
allegory, personifying an abstraction, parodying a poet or a historian,
flattering an emperor's mistress, putting an audience into good temper
with him and itself, unveiling an imposture, destroying a religion or a
reputation, drawing a character. The last is perhaps the most
disputable of the catalogue. How many of his personages are realities
to us when we have read, and not mere labels for certain modes of
thought or conduct? Well, characterization is not the first, but only
the second thing with him; what is said matters rather more than who
says it; he is more desirous that the argument should advance than that
the person should reveal himself; nevertheless, nothing is ever said
that is out of character; while nothing can be better of the kind than
some of his professed personifications, his _Plutus_ or his
_Philosophy_, we do retain distinct impressions of at least an
irresponsible _Zeus_ and a decorously spiteful _Hera_, a well-meaning,
incapable _Helius_, a bluff _Posidon_, a gallant _Prometheus_, a
one-idea'd _Charon_; _Timon_ is more than misanthropy, _Eucrates_ than
superstition, _Anacharsis_ than intelligent curiosity, _Micyllus_ than
ignorant poverty, poor _Hermotimus_ than blind faith, and Lucian than a
scoffer.