Peculiar to the time and place was the solemn exposition, after lavation of hands, processions backwards and forwards, and certain changes of vestments, of the identical earthen vessels--veritable relics of the old religion of Numa!--the vessels from which the holy Numa himself had eaten and drunk, set forth above a kind of altar, amid a cloud of flowers and incense, and many lights, for the veneration of the credulous or the faithful.
"They were, in fact, cups or vases of burnt clay, rude in form: and the religious veneration thus offered to them expressed men's desire to give honour to a simpler age, before iron had found place in human life: the persuasion that that age was worth remembering: a hope that it might come again.
"That a Numa, and his age of gold, would return, has been the hope or the dream of some, in every period.

Yet if he did come back, or any equivalent of his presence, he could but weaken, and by no means smite through, that root of evil, certainly of sorrow, of outraged human sense, in things, which one must carefully distinguish from all preventible accidents.

Death, and the little perpetual daily dyings, which have something of its sting, he must [180] necessarily leave untouched.

And, methinks, that were all the rest of man's life framed entirely to his liking, he would straightway begin to sadden himself, over the fate--say, of the flowers! For there is, there has come to be since Numa lived perhaps, a capacity for sorrow in his heart, which grows with all the growth, alike of the individual and of the race, in intellectual delicacy and power, and which will find its aliment.
"Of that sort of golden age, indeed, one discerns even now a trace, here and there.

Often have I maintained that, in this generous southern country at least, Epicureanism is the special philosophy of the poor.