Of another sort is the opposition of Parny to Christianity--a poet named the French Tibullus on account of his successful elegies--which is conspicuous in a prolix poem of ten cantos, a kind of epic poem entitled "La Guerre des Dieux," as an attempt made to bring ridicule upon Christian conceptions in the interests of jest and comedy carried out in a tone of unrestrained frivolity, yet withal marked by good humour and considerable talent. The sallies of wit here are not, however, carried beyond the point of levity; we have few traces of the wanton disregard of things that are sacred and of the highest excellence such as marks the period of Frederick von Schlegel's "Lucinde." The Virgin Mary no doubt is treated very badly in this poem. The monks, Dominicans and Franciscans, yield to the seductions of wine and Bacchanals, and the nuns do much the same with Fauns, and the result is sufficiently shocking. Finally, however, the gods of the old world are vanquished and withdraw from Olympus to Parnassus. As a concluding illustration Goethe in his "Bride of Corinth" has more profoundly depicted in a vivacious picture the banishment of love, not so much as the result of any true principle of Christianity as the misconceived interpretation of resignation and sacrifice. The poet here contrasts that false asceticism which seeks to condemn the determination of a woman to be wife and rates that enforced celibacy as something more holy than marriage with the natural feelings of mankind. Just as we find in Schiller the opposition between the Greek imagination and the critical abstractions of our modern Enlightenment, so we may detect here the Hellenistic ethical and sensuous justifications in the matter of love and marriage, placed in direct contrast to ideas which can only claim to belong to the Christian religion when regarded from a wholly one-sided and therefore incorrect point of view. With the greatest art a really horrible tone dominates the entire work; and the principal reason is this, that it remains quite uncertain whether the action has reference to a real maiden, or a dead one, a living reality or a ghost; and in the metre of the verse itself in an equally masterly way the threads of light foolery and seriousness are so interwoven as to make the uncanniness still more effective.