Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/209

Rh Mirabeau senior was wealthy enough to roam earth in a coach and four, but preferred his rural retreat; Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher on the throne of the civilized universe, could have found diversion from the cares of empire in the hunting grounds of three different continents, but the proconsuls of Pontus and Numidia invited him in vain; he stuck to his task like a slave to his treadmill, and shunned even music:

ignored panegyrics in honor of his virtues, and tolerated circus games only as a concession to the natural depravity of his subjects, who might riot in the atrocities of the amphitheater, while their ruler wore out his life with the elaboration of reform plans and sought recreation only in prose elegies and communion with the spirit of Zeno.

Now, the theory of exhaustion would have been strikingly confirmed if the offspring of the great altruist had been a rickety whimpy-owl, one of those listless youngsters supposed to be too good for the present world, but withal too indolent to aspire to the rewards of the next.

But the matrimonial venture of the sad-eyed philosopher resulted •in a birth of a chuckleheaded pupus who grew up into a bull-necked and vindictive blackguard, a reckless egotist who passed his time with riots and the arrangement of festivals in honor of his own merits. When one of his sycophants remarked that his moral and physical perfections had never before been united in a human being, he did not hesitate to enroll himself among the Olympian gods. He wasted the revenue of a province on a single circus pageant, and not only bade grumblers go to hades, but sent them there by scores and hecatombs. "The Prætorian Guards have been pacified by an enormous bribe" said the prefect Perennis, "but had we not better do something to allay the resentment of the people, something to perpetuate our names in the memory of posterity?" "Well, you can change the name of Rome to Colonia Commodiana," said this son of a modest father.

A son of the Inquisitor Hæmmerlin was indicted for heresy, and there is a tradition about a Syrian wood devil ("satyr") who was converted by a sermon of St. Eusebius and reared a family of saints.

But from Syria comes also an anecdote that suggests a solution of the inversion puzzle. "That's Lot's wife" said Professor Bertholet's guide, pointing to a rock-salt pillar forty feet high and about four yards in diameter. "Is that so?" said the witty Frenchman. Then I'll bet gold to copper that Mr. Lot wasn't more than five feet high."

Again, a multitude of analogies confirms the aptness of the