Most of the art and literature the world has known has been untrue. The pictures of the past have been painted from the distorted minds of visionists, and the pliant brains of tools. They have represented impossible gods and unthinkable saints; angels and cherubs and demons; everything but men and women. Saints may be all right in their place, but a saint with a halo around his head was born of myth and not of art. Angels may be well enough, but all rational men prefer an angel with arms to an angel with wings. When these artists were not drawing saints and madonnas, they were spending their time in painting kings and royal knaves; and the pictures of the rulers were as unlike the men and women that they were said to represent as the servile spirit of the painter was unlike that of the true artist of to-day. Of course an artist would not paint the poor; they had no clothes that would adorn a work of art, and no money nor favors that could remunerate the toil. An ancient artist could no more afford to serve the poor than a modern lawyer could defend the weak. After literature had so far advanced as to concern other beings than gods and kings, the authors of these ancient days told of wondrous characters endowed with marvelous powers; knights with giant strength and magic swords; princes with wondrous palaces and heaps of gold; travelers that met marvelous beasts and slew them in extraordinary ways; giants with forms like mountains, and strength like oxen, who could vanquish all but little dwarfs. Railroads were not invented in those early days, but travel was facilitated by the use of seven league boots. Balloons and telescopes were not yet known, but this did not keep favored heroes from peering at the stars or looking down from on high upon the earth; they had but to plant a magic bean before they went to bed at night, and in the morning it had grown so tall that it reached up to the sky; and the hero, although not skilled in climbing, needed simply to grasp the stalk and say, “Hitchety, hatchety, up I go. Hitchety, hatchety, up I go,” and by this means soon vanish in the clouds. Tales of this sort used once to delight the world, and the readers half believed them true. We give them to children now, and the best of these view them with a half contempt.