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tractive of the Western agitator is employed by the Cyprian also, from flattery of the people to abuse of the existing order ; and his political arguments and exhortations have the same wide range, beginning with lowly exaggeration, then rising to misrepresen-tation, and finally soaring into the thunders of absolute fiction. The ' Daily News,' or even the ' Pall Mall Gazette ' itself, might have envied the success with which, shortly before my arrival, the patriots had collected a few hundred women and children, had sent them with a petition from Nicosia to Government House— a pleasant stroll of little more than a mile—and contrived to get the event described in the English journals as a magnificent demonstration composed of ten thousand persons. I am going here to indulge in a half-minute's digression. To the sober reason few things can seem sillier than the proposal of professional religion-makers to worship idealised humanity ; and yet occasionally one can almost detect a meaning in it. For in humanity as a whole there is under the changing surface a persistence, an august immuta-bility, which at odd moments is brought home to us, and is like nothing else in the world. What, for instance, can be more striking than this characteristic, the same always and everywhere : that the men who take the trouble to say they despise rank are men who inwardly grovel and cringe before it, and would wear it themselves, if they could, with the most 144 IN AN ENCHANTED ISLAND

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