But if such are the advantages which Poverty brings, he has a very natural question to ask-- How comes it then that all men flee thy face? _Pov._ Because I make men better. But her pleading is in vain. “Away with your rhetoric,” says Chremylus; “our ears are deaf to all such arguments.” He uses almost the very words of Sir Hudibras-- “He who complies against his will, Is of his own opinion still.”[54] And an unanimous sentence of expulsion is passed against the unpopular deity, while Plutus is sent, under the escort of Cario, with bed and bedding, to take up his quarters for the night in the temple of Æsculapius, there to invoke the healing power which can restore his sight. An interval of time unusually long for the Athenian drama is supposed to elapse between this and what we may call the second act of the comedy--the break in the action having been most probably marked by a chant from the Chorus, which has not, however, come down to us in the manuscripts. The scene reopens with the return of Cario from the temple on the morning following. The resort to Æsculapius has been entirely successful. But Aristophanes does not miss the opportunity of sharp satire upon the gross materialities of the popular creed and the tricks of priestcraft. Cario informs his mistress and the Chorus, who come to inquire the result, that the god has performed the cure in person--going round the beds of the patients, who lay there awaiting his visit, for all the world like a modern hospital surgeon, making his diagnosis of each case, with an assistant following him with pestle and mortar and portable medicine-chest. Plutus had been cured almost instantaneously--quicker, as the narrator impudently tells his mistress, than she could toss off half-a-dozen glasses of wine. But one Neoclides, who had come there on the same errand (though, blind as he was, observes Cario, not the sharpest-sighted of them all could match him in stealing), fares very differently at the hands of the god of medicine; for Æsculapius applies to his eyes a lotion of garlic and vinegar, which makes him roar with pain, and leaves him blinder than ever. Another secret of the temple, too, the cunning varlet has seen, while he was pretending to be asleep like the rest. He saw the priests go round quietly, after the lamps were put out, and eat all the cakes and fruit brought by the patients as offerings to the god. He took the liberty, he says--“thinking it must be a very holy practice”--of following their example, and so got possession of a pudding which an old lady, one of the patients, had placed carefully by her bedside for her supper, and on which he had set his heart when first he saw it. His mistress is shocked at such profanity. Unhallowed varlet! didst not fear the god?