“It must be with his own hands, please your Excellency,” said Apollo.
“Then,” cried the Governor, pitching to the poet the first scroll brought to him, “the thirteenth book. Who cares about the thirteenth book? Pop it in!”
“The thirteenth book!” exclaimed Nonnus, “containing the contest between wine and honey, without which my epic becomes totally and entirely unintelligible!”
“This, then,” said the Governor, picking out another, which chanced to be the seventeenth,
“In my seventeenth book,” objected Nonnus, “Bacchus plants vines in India, and the superiority of wine to milk is convincingly demonstrated.”
“Well,” rejoined the Governor, “what say you to the twenty-second?”
“With my Hamadryad! I can never give up my Hamadryad!”
“Then,” said the Governor, contemptuously hurling the whole set in the direction of Nonnus, “burn which you will, only burn!”
The wretched poet sat among his scrolls looking for a victim. All his forty-eight children were equally dear to his parental heart. The cries of applause and derision from the spectators, and the formidable bellowings of the exasperated monks who surrounded Pachymius, did not tend to steady his nerves, or render the task of critical discrimination the easier,
“I won’t! I won’t!” he exclaimed at last, starting up defiantly. “Let the bishopric go to the devil! Any one of my similes is worth all the bishoprics in Egypt!”