As is well known, opportunities for performing decapitation upon a Gorgon are few; apart from the rarity of the monster there is always the risk lest the surgeon may be frozen stiff in the midst of the operation; and it becomes still more difficult when it has to be performed in the Fourth Dimension through a looking-glass. We have the authority of _The Mikado_ that self-decapitation is a difficult, not to say painful, operation, and Benvenuto could not have practised his method before a shaving-mirror, because he had a bushy beard, though some of us have inadvertently tried in our extreme youth before we have learned the advisability of using safety razors. Anyhow, Benvenuto’s Perseus is a very realistic, violent, and wonderful piece of sculpture; if he had done nothing else he would have still been one of the greatest artists in the world. My own misfortune was in going to Florence before I had seriously read his autobiography; I wish to warn others lest that misfortune should befall them. Read Cellini’s autobiography--_then_, go to Florence! You will see how the author of the autobiography was the only man who could possibly have done the Perseus; how, in modelling the old pre-hellenic demigod, he was really modelling his own subconscious mind. Death When William Dunbar sang, “Timor mortis perturbat me,” he but expressed the most universal of human--perhaps of animate--feelings. It is no shame to fear death; the fear appears to be a necessary condition of our existence. The shame begins when we allow that fear to influence us in the performance of our duty. But why should we fear death at all? It is hardly an explanation to say that the fear of death is implanted in living things lest the individual should be too easily slain and thereby the species become extinct. Who implanted it? And why is it so necessary that that individual should survive? Why is it necessary that the species should survive? And so on--to name only a few of the unanswerable questions that crowd upon us whenever we sit down to muse upon that problem which every living thing must some time have a chance of solving. The question of death is inextricably bound up with the interpretation of innumerable abstract nouns, such as truth, justice, good, evil, and many more, which all religions make some effort to interpret. Philosophy attempts it by the light of man’s reason; religion by a light from some extra-human source; but all alike represent the struggles of earnest men to solve the insoluble.