"'Jupiter Optimus Maximus, brandishing in his all-powerful right hand the three-forked fatal thunderbolt and by his nod alone doing what he will.' Everything that had happened in recent years, in France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Africa, Greece, he declared had been done by the will of that man alone. All this was said at Rome, by a Roman, in the tongue of Rome, and with the Roman accent. But what had all this to do with Julius, the high-priest of the Christian religion, the vicar of Christ, the successor of Peter and Paul?--or with the cardinals and bishops, the vicegerents of the other Apostles? As to the topic he had undertaken to treat, nothing could be more solemn, more real, more wonderful, more lofty, or more suited to kindle emotion. Who, though he were endowed with but a very common kind of eloquence, could not with such an argument have drawn tears from men of stone? The plan of the discourse was this:--first to depict the death of Christ as sad and then by a change of style to describe it as glorious and triumphant--in order, of course, that he might give us a specimen of Cicero's δεινώσεως, by which he was able to carry away the emotions of his hearers at will. "HYPOLOGUS:--Well, did he succeed? "BULEPHORUS:--For my part, when he was working his hardest upon those melancholy feelings which the rhetoricians call πάθη, to tell the truth I was more inclined to laugh. I did not see a person in that whole concourse one whit the sadder, when he was piling up with the whole force of his eloquence the unmerited sufferings of the innocent Christ. Nor, on the other hand, did I see anyone the more cheerful when he was wholly occupied with showing forth His death to us as triumphant, praiseworthy, and glorious.... "Not to make more words about it, this Roman talked in such a very Roman fashion that I heard nothing about the death of Christ. And yet, because he was so eagerly striving after a Ciceronian diction, he seemed to the Ciceronians to have spoken marvellously. Of his subject he said hardly a word; he seemed neither to understand it nor to care for it. Nor did he say anything to the point nor rouse any emotion. The only reason for praising him was that he spoke like a Roman and recalled a something of Cicero. If such a discourse had been delivered by a schoolboy to his mates it might have been praised as an evidence of a certain talent; but on such a day, before such an audience, and on such a topic, I pray you, what sense was there in it?"