“I am more content than I expected to be with my gracious and learned host, Sidonius Apollinaris. In the first place, he is my host, a relationship in itself demanding loyalty in return, and he is the kindest of hosts. My two mother-tongues are a recommendation for me to him; the kind of natural inability to talk bad Greek and Latin derived from our father and from thee. I cannot, however, even from loyalty to a host, admire his style of poetry, much lauded as it is. The gods and goddesses, the heroes and nymphs, stalk about in it so like second-rate actors in a theatre. They seem at once so childish, poor dears, and so old-fashioned, so shadowy and so wooden; the real world having been long possessed by heroes so much more living, by saints so much more original and interesting than these faded modern pictures of a world ill understood and so long passed away. “Why Venus and all the faded troop should be called back to bless a Christian marriage, or all Olympus to crown and glorify a modern senator, who at all events, whatever he believes or disbelieves, does not believe in them, one cannot see. Moreover, there are the false quantities which jar on one’s ear so curiously! But I must not grow cynical. It must be a lack in me that I have no taste for the wit of acrostics or the pomp of panegyrics. And there is always the relief of turning from these to the simple old music of thy Homer, the earnest thought of thy Aeschylus, the pure limpid verse of our own Virgil. But I hear my host’s pleasant voice, and am stopped in good time by his gracious kindness.” * * * * * “I resume:—We assembled yesterday morning at the sepulchre of Saint Justin, and had Matins and Tierce with all the city. And then when the ordinary people had dispersed, we of the first families of Lyons made a rendezvous at the tomb of Syagrius the Saint. There, on the green sward under the trellised vines, was much merriment, and many good stories were told,—good happily in the sense not only of being witty, but of not being low or bad. And then, when, weary of this idleness, the young men played at tennis, and the old ones at backgammon, witty verses were composed and recited (one set in honour of a towel which had the privilege of wiping the perspiration from the face of an ‘illustrious old gentleman,’ who had somewhat rashly ventured on tennis rather than on the more tranquil sport of backgammon).