"There is the glorious Orazel!" he said--"The father, as we all must own, of the Art of Poesy, and indeed of all true literature! Yet there be some who swear he never lived at all--aye! though his poems have come down to us,--and many are the arguments I have had with so-called wise men like Zabastes, concerning his style and method of versification. Everything he has written bears the impress of the same master-touch,--nevertheless garrulous controversialists hold that his famous work the 'Ruva-Kalama' descended by oral tradition from mouth to mouth till it came to us in its 'improved' present condition. 'Improved!'" and Sah-luma laughed disdainfully,--"As if the mumbling of an epic poem from grandsire to grandson could possibly improve it! ... it would rather be deteriorated, if not altogether changed into the merest doggerel! Nay, nay!--the 'Ruva-Kalama,' is the achievement of one great mind,--not twenty Oruzels were born in succession to write it,--there was, there could be only one, and he, by right supreme, is chief of the Bards Immortal! As well might fools hereafter wrangle together and say there were many Sah-lumas! ... only I have taken good heed posterity shall know there was only ONE,--unmatched for love-impassioned singing throughout the length and breadth of the world!" He sprang up from his recumbent posture and attracted Theos's attention to another bust even finer than the last,--it was placed on a pedestal wreathed at the summit and at the base with laurel. "The divine Hyspiros!" he exclaimed pointing to it in a sort of ecstasy--"The Master from whom it may be I have caught the perfect entrancement of my own verse-melody! His fame, as thou knowest, is unrivalled and universal--yet--canst thou believe it! ... there has been of late an ass found in Al-Kyris who hath chosen him as a subject for his braying--and other asses join in the uneuphonius chorus. The marvellous Plays of Hyspiros! ... the grandest tragedies, the airiest comedies, the tenderest fantasies, ever created by human brain, have been called in question by these thistle-eating animals!--and one most untractable mule-head hath made pretence to discover therein a passage of secret writing which shall, so the fool thinks, prove that Hyspiros was not the author of his own works, but only a literary cheat, and forger of another and lesser man's inspiration! By the gods!--one's sides would split with laughter at the silly brute, were he not altogether too contemptible to provoke even derision! Hyspiros a traitor to the art he served and glorified? ... Hyspiros a literary juggler and trickster? ... By the Serpent's Head! they may as well seek to prove the fiery Sun in Heaven a common oil-lamp, as strive to lessen by one iota the transcendent glory of the noblest poet the centuries have ever seen!"