What a subject, indeed, for such a lecturer to choose; Professor Huxley once selected the snake theme, and, bringing to bear on it all the vast resources of his scientific mind, made the topic instinct with interest. There yet remained, however, for Mr. Ruskin’s magic, ample space and verge for holiday-making, for just as it was with the chimæra in Coleridge’s problem, that went bombonating, (booming like a bumble-bee) in space, so there is such a prodigious quantity of room to spare in the realms of snake fancy that no lecturer need fear to come into collision with any solids, let him dissipate as he will. Again, it happens that nearly all the world of myths converges upon, or radiates from, the great serpent fact; so that Mr. Ruskin, sitting in the very centre of the fairy web, could shake as he liked all the strands to its utmost circumference. Seated by the shores of old romance, he could at any time have thrown his pebbles where he would, certain of raising ripples everywhere, and of disturbing from each haunted reed-bed flocks of fabled things. But how much greater was his power of raising these spirits of past story when he circled over the same regions of imagination bestriding a winged snake — churning up the old waters with a Shesh of his own, and summoning into sight at the sound of his pipe all the mystery-loving reptiles of mythology, like one of the old Psylli or the Marmarids, or one of the Magi, sons of Chus, “tame, at whose voice, spellbound, the dread cerastes lay.”
Eastern charmers, with their bags of battered snakes, not a tooth among them all, become very poor impostors indeed, compared with our modern master of reptile manipulation. The Hindoo’s snakes are feeble, jaded vermin, sick of the whole exhibition as mere ill-timed
