CHAPTER III.
THE MILLENNIUM.
Aristotle has laid it down that the highest drama concerns itself with reversal of fortune befalling a man highly renowned and prosperous, of better character rather than worse; and brought about less by vice than by some great error or frailty.

After all that has been said, you will wonder how I can admit a frailty in Major Hymen.
But he had one.
You will wonder yet more when you hear it defined.

To tell the truth, he--our foremost citizen--yet missed being a perfect Trojan.
We were far indeed from suspecting it; he was our fine flower, our representative man.

Yet in the light of later events I can see now, and plainly enough, where he fell short.
A University Extension Lecturer who descended upon us the other day and, encouraged by the crowds that flocked to hear him discourse on English Miracle Plays, advertised a second series of lectures, this time on English Moralities, but only to find his audience diminished to one young lady (whom he promptly married)--this lecturer, I say, whose text-books indeed indicated several points of difference between the Miracle Play and the Morality, but nothing to account for so marked a subsidence in the register, departed in a huff, using tart language and likening us to a pack of children blowing bubbles.
There is something in the fellow's simile.

When an idea gets hold of us in Troy, we puff at it, we blow it out and distend it to a globe, pausing and calling on one another to mark the prismatic tints, the fugitive images, symbols, meanings of the wide world glassed upon our pretty toy.