228 The Poets and Nature. 



The Mussulman brings his slipper down on a fly "in the 

 name of the Prophet." In hot countries special engines are 

 prepared for their discomfiture and destruction prodigious 

 whisks of horsehair or yaktail, round flaps of leather attached 

 to long handles of cane. Sancho Panza cursed them as 

 being enemies to sleep ; and all through Southern Europe 

 they are under the ban of a universal execration. "Fly- 

 time " is in half the world a season of terrors ; when com- 

 merce hesitates to busy itself, social arrangements are in 

 abeyance, and everything is dislocated and in disorder, 

 simply because the flies are abroad. 



One of the plagues of Egypt was the fly. It is one of the 

 penalties of Purgatory. All this is, of course, very much to 

 the discredit of this small satellite of man, this importunate 

 dependent of humanity. 



Historically, flies are insignificant. In Philistia they had 

 a fly-god, Baalzeebub. Egypt, in her ancient litanies, prayed 

 to Achor for deliverance from them, but, judging from 

 modern Egypt, with but scant response. Cowley, in his ode, 

 makes the mistake of thinking Aaron's plague was a miscel- 

 laneous assortment of species, a mixed entomology let 

 loose wholesale upon the Pharaoh and his people. 



1 ' Harmful flies, in nations numberless, 

 Composed the mighty army's spurious host ; 

 Of different manners, different languages, 

 And different habits, too they were, 

 And different arms they bore ; 

 And some, like Scythians, lived on blood ; 

 And some on green, and some on flowery food. 

 And Acharon the airy prince led on this various host." 



Now, Cowley, thinking to improve on the original, has 

 destroyed the whole horror of the plague ; for surely there 

 is something positively grotesque in avarious host of wasps, 

 gad-flies, hornets,. dragon-flies, bluebottles, bumble-bees, fire- 

 flies, mosquitoes, may-flies, gnats, sand-flies, midges, and all 

 the rest of them. 



