"We are above time. We Hellenes are alive to-day as we were over two thousand years ago. We still think aloud or on papyrus the most beautiful and the truest thoughts of men. Have we not but quite lately sent down for one of us to while amongst us for ever? He too began as a Cynic. But having learnt the inanity of the so-called 'future,' he rose above time and space, and soared on the wings of eagle concepts to the heights where we welcome him. He has just entered the near port in a boat rowed by the nymphs of Circe. We cannot close our meeting in a more condign fashion than by asking Hebe to offer him the goblet of welcome." The eyes of all present turned to the shore, where a man of middle age, who had evidently regained his former vigour, walked up to the steps of the amphitheatre. When he came quite near to the Assembly, Diogenes exclaimed: "Hail to thee, Frederick Nietzsche!" THE THIRD NIGHT ALCIBIADES ON WOMEN IN ENGLAND In the third night the gods and heroes assembled at Venice. Where the Canal Grande almost disappears in the sea, there on mystic gondolas the divine Assembly met in the town of Love and Passion, at the whilom centre of Power wedded to Beauty. It was a starlit night of incomparable charm. The Canal Grande, with its majestic silence; the dark yet clearly outlined Palaces surrounding the Canal like beautiful women forming a procession in honour of a triumphant hero; the grave spires of hundreds of churches standing like huge sentinels of the town of millions of secrets never revealed, and vainly searched for in her vast archives; and last not least the invisible Past hovering sensibly over every stone of the unique city; all this contributed ever new charms to the meeting of the gods and heroes at Venice. Zeus, not unforgetful of the Eternal Feminine, asked Alcibiades to entertain the Assembly with his adventures amongst the women of England. Alcibiades thereupon rose and spake as follows: "O Zeus and the other gods and heroes, I am still too much under the fascination of the women with whom I have spent the last twelve months, to be in a position to tell you with becoming calmness what kind of beings they are. In my time I knew the women of over a dozen Greek states, and many a woman of the Barbarians. Yet not one of them was remotely similar to the women of England. I will presently relate what I observed of the beauty of these northern women. "But first of all, it seems to me, I had better dwell upon one particular type of womanhood which I have never met before except when once, eight hundred years ago, I travelled in company with Abelard through a few towns of Mediæval France. That type is what in England they call the middle-class woman. She is not always beautiful, and yet might be so frequently, were her features not spoilt by her soul. She is the most bigoted, the most prejudiced, and most intolerant piece of perverted humanity that can be imagined.