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Atahualpa and Huasca, the two sons of the recently dead Inca, Huana Capac, were engaged in a fierce struggle for the throne. This in itself was something of a shock to the devout subjects of the Inca race, looking as they did upon the Imperial Children of the Sun as superhuman beings. It was thus a war of demigods waged by doubting and diffident mortals.

It had been glorious in its day, but that brilliant democratic Olympus of demigods had lost its freshness, and become dry, cold, unmeaning, vain, superficial, and lacking in both head and heart. Hence the success of the Macedonian rule, and afterward of the Roman. The empire had not yet fallen into the error of excessive centralization.

He was sketching his design of a Galatea and Polyphemus on the wall; for the wall was only whitewashed, and covered already with the multiform vagaries whether of master or pupils, caricatures and demigods, hands and feet, torsos and monsters, and Venuses. The rude creations, all mutilated, jarring, and mingled, gave a cynical, mocking, devil-may-care kind of aspect to the sanctum of art.

Nevertheless, they have dared to attribute to their visible and man-made images a divine and eternal existence. We can see the same fact in Brahminism, where man, given to his inclination for exterior forms, has created, little by little, and not all at once, an army of gods and demigods.

It had pictures of all the gods and goddesses, demigods and heroes; and he tried to make poems upon their various characters and exploits. But Apollo was his favorite, and I believe it was with some hope of employing them in a personation of the god that he coveted those red-topped sharp-toed calf-skin boots.

It is not surprising that a tradition grew up about the Federal Convention which hedged it round with a sort of awe and reverence. Even Thomas Jefferson referred to it as "an assembly of demigods."

And, after all, this precursor, this runner before, was but one of hundreds of later Champlains, Nicolets, and La Salles, in the wake of whose visions came the producers, those who led forth the corn and wheat from the furrows, the trees from the forests, the coal from the ground, the iron from the hills, the steel from the retorts, the fire from the wells, the water from the mountains, electricity from the clouds and the cataract dukes, field-marshals, generals, demigods whom no myth has enhaloed or poetry immortalized.

Impossible for him to have survived the great change. Death was inevitable and right. He wanted rest, and rest is his, at last. "We must be true to all he thought us, you and I to all he believed us, even demigods! He shall inspire and enlighten us, O my love; and with his memory to guide us, faith and fortitude shall not be lacking. "Now, we must go. Work waits for us.

The lunatic Caligula now suddenly took it into his head to transplant this custom to Rome to transplant it with all the religious pomp of the Egyptian monarchy, and thus transform the family of Augustus, which up to the present had been merely the most eminent family of the Roman aristocracy, into a dynasty of gods and demigods, whose members were to be united by marriage among themselves in order not to pollute the celestial purity of their blood.

He would not play any part. Men paid him wages for work, and so helped to feed and clothe him; but he never exchanged opinions with them. He was so simply and naturally humble if he can be called humble who never aspires that humility was no distinct quality in him, nor could he conceive of it. Wiser men were demigods to him.