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Came Hermes first from the hill, and said, 'Daphnis, who is it that torments thee; child, whom dost thou love with so great desire? The neatherds came, and the shepherds; the goatherds came: all they asked what ailed him. Came also Priapus, Begin, ye Muses dear, begin the pastoral song!
The ex-diva was certainly canaille, but her paw was open and ready, whereas this woman's palm, while quite as itching, was delicately withheld. Their gods were identical. It was the shrines that differed. The one at which the Tamburini presided was plain as a pikestaff. The Austen's was bedecked like a girl on her wedding-day. Behind each Priapus leered. Above both was the shining face of Mammon.
Leomedon Heaven's dire resentments felt, And Telephus's blood washt out his guilt. We cannot from the wrathful godhead run Crafty Ulysses cou'd not Neptune shun. Provokt Priapus o're the land and sea, Has left his Hellespont to follow me."
The cause of the poet's resentment against the Pope was the prohibition of a certain work, entitled Priapeia, which Francus had commenced, describing the feasts of Priapus. Pius IV. refused to allow the poet to complete his book, and ordered that which he had already written to be burned.
And so he did, by divine assistance, for it is said that the wrath of Diana of Priapus brought the great tempest upon the men of Pontus, because they had robbed her temple, and removed her image.
Ah! who would not have smiled with him to see, against the earthen red background, the brown-faced maiden dancing with gleeful reverence before the god Priapus, wrought in the fine clay of an Etruscan vase? The Latin queen caressed her chimera. The whims of Imperial Rome were there in life, the bath was disclosed, the toilette of a languid Julia, dreaming, waiting for her Tibullus.
To love, for our women, is to play at lying, as children play at hide and seek, a hideous orgy of the heart, worse than the lubricity of the Romans, or the Saturnalia of Priapus; a bastard parody of vice itself, as well as of virtue; a loathsome comedy where all is whispering and sidelong glances, where all is small, elegant, and deformed, like those porcelain monsters brought from China; a lamentable satire on all that is beautiful and ugly, divine and infernal; a shadow without a body, a skeleton of all that God has made."
Would Priapus were here, as he used to be at the nocturnal festivals in Crete, that I might see him play backwards, and wriggle and shake to the purpose. Ay, ay, this is the world, and t'other is the country; may I never piss if this be not an antichthonian land, and our very antipodes.
The little villages high up are just as white, the mountains just as grey and shadowy when evening falls. Nothing is changed except ourselves. I expect to find a statue of Priapus or pastoral Pan, hung with wreaths of flowers the meal cake, honey, and spilt wine upon his altar, and young boys and maidens dancing round.
But that quarrel shrinks into comparative concord beside the common peril from the resurrected gods of paganism, from Thor and Odin and Priapus. And it was always an exaggerated quarrel half misunderstanding, like most quarrels. Neither St. Augustine nor St. Anselm believed God was other than One.
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