'--There is a simpler Anglo-Saxon term for this
condition, but I spare you. The eastern Prometheus went on seriously
with his work, and still produced the same perfect models, faultless
alike in brain and leg. But when it came to the delicate finish, when
the last touches were to be made, his hand shook a little, and the more
delicate members went awry. It was thus that instead of the power of
seeing every colour properly, one man came out with a pair of optics
which turned everything to green, and this verdancy probably transmitted
itself to the intelligence. Another, to continue the allegory, whose
tympanum had slipped a little under the unsteady fingers of the
man-maker, heard everything in a wrong sense, and his life was
miserable, because, if you sang his praises, he believed you were
ridiculing him, and if you heaped abuse upon him, he thought you were
telling lies of him.
But as Prometheus Orientalis grew more jovial, it seems to have come
into his head to make mistakes on purpose. 'I'll have a friend to laugh
with,' quoth he; and when warned by an attendant Yaksha, or demon, that
men who laughed one hour often wept the next, he swore a lusty oath,
struck his thumb heavily on a certain bump in the skull he was
completing, and holding up his little doll, cried, 'Here is one who will
laugh at everything!'
I must now add what the legend neglects to tell.
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