If I write this rather strongly it is because I feel that I am writing in the interest of strength and health and purity and freedom, at a time when the mass of our literature is infected with servile weakness and disease and that “obscenity, which is ever blasphemy against the divine beauty in life.” For all obscene things batten on darkness, and light is fatal to them. But for the Bumble who rules over us, the naked beauty is obscene and the naked truth is blasphemous; he thinks that the Venus de Medici came out of Holywell Street, and is inclined to believe that all the fossil records of geology were forged by the Devil to throw discredit upon the book of Genesis. One cannot without a keen pang of shame and rage think of what we are when one remembers what we were, when one recalls our old and glorious literature, in the wide world unsurpassed; our literature noble and renowned, ever most glorious when most manly and daring. GREAT CHRIST IS DEAD (1875.) We have all heard the wonderful story, recounted by Plutarch in his treatise on the Cessation of the Oracles, how, in the reign of Tiberius Cæsar, a ship sailing from Greece to Italy was becalmed for the night at the islet-rock of Paxus in the Ionian Sea, between the Echinades and Ithaca, when a loud and terrible voice from the land called Thamous the pilot. And he having responded at the third appeal, “I am here; what would you with me?” the voice, grown yet louder and more terrible, commanded him to announce on arriving at Palodes that Pan the Great was dead. Accordingly, when the vessel reached this place, whose site I believe the learned have not yet fixed, Thamous stood on the prow and lifting his voice shoreward cried, “Pan the Great is dead!”—whereon were heard great moanings and lamentations, mysterious and multitudinous. Not having Plutarch at hand, I have refreshed my memory from Rabelais, who repeats this well-authenticated story by the mouth of Pantagruel, in the twenty-eighth chapter of the fourth book of his inestimable work, following soon on that tempest of all tempests wherein Friar John and Panurge so variously distinguished themselves. The good Pantagruel goes on to expound the story after his own manner, thinking that it referred not to the heathen god Pan, but to our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, “ignominiously put to death by the envy and iniquity of the pontiffs, doctors, presbyters, and monks of the Mosaic dispensation....”