Yet were all these brilliant careers, blighted affections, and untimely deaths, as Mr. Coxe would have us believe, mere agglomerations of myths of the Rosy Dawn wooed by the Sun, leaving him alone in his glory, and returning to him ere he sinks to his rest. Was there nothing in them of the sense of man's failures, of his tender hopes, of the one thing wanting in time of success, of the softer feelings of decline? Was there no truth at all in the outline? Why, a little less documentary evidence, and it would be easy to believe not only that there had been siege of Paris, no Charles, no Roland, and no Roncesvalles, but that the Crusaders' capture of Jerusalem was a mere Christian allegory; for were they not warriors of the cross led by Godfrey, or God's Peace, and the siege of Granada another such fable, with such another hero in Gonzalo? Surely these would prove that the gallant deeds of the Greeks, the Gael, and even the Nibelung, had at least as much foundation as the other fabled embellished enterprises nearer our own days. While Samson means Splendid Sun, and such conclusions can be drawn from the names of Napoleon and his mother, we decline to think the siege of Troy explained by identifying Helen with the Indian Sarama or the Dawn, who was beguiled by Pani, the deceiver, into drinking milk, and thus becoming subject to him; or Briseis, merely another form of the dawn, and Achilles, a mere solar-hero.

That tales, with mythical atmospherical sources, clustered round a great event, we are quite ready to grant; nor can anything be plainer or more satisfactory, than Mr. Coxe's explanation of many of the baser and more disgusting stories imputed to the deities as being really misunderstood and forgotten parables of the phenonena of nature. It takes a nightmare off the mind to find that those were not inventions of the highhearted men of Athens and Thebes, so much as old allegories with their meaning lost. Nor do we wonder that in the delight of the discovery it is treated as a key to everything. Achilles has been disposed of as a solar myth, with considerable bendings of the Iliad to serve the purpose, and Ulysses is the same story. Penelope is his dawn and sunset, weaving clouds into a bright web, soon dispersed. Telemachus resembles Patroclus in being a faint reflex of his brilliance (as if friends and sons were unknown, except as moons). The suitors are the dark clouds that obscure the west; their slaughter is the crimson colouring that dyes them when the sun breaks through at his setting.

All this we might be content to read as hypothesis and argument, but we object to making children learn it in a catechism of mythology as an established fact. Here are two questions

and answers:

'636. "Is the character of Odysseus true to that of the Achaians or historical Greeks?"

"We have no evidence whatever for thinking that it was. It may be more justly called, not only Achaian, but inhuman. Odysseus uses poisoned arrows: he shoots a man behind his back, and without warning; he tells lies whenever it suits his purpose to do so; he slays a whole band of chieftains who had done him no great injury, and then hangs up, like sparrows on a string, a crowd of women, simply because they had not resisted the demands of the suitors." '637. "What have we to learn from this?"

"That only mischief can follow if we will insist on regarding as a human model, a being whose story has grown up from phrases which lie at the root of the story of Achilles."-Coxe, p. 180.

Some mischief, we think, grows from over-working a theory. If Ulysses ever used poisoned arrows, it was not while he was in Homer's hands, and as to his other 'inhuman' attributes, surely falsehood was a notable characteristic of the ordinary Greek; and the deceptions of Ulysses, though painful to a Christian reader, were quite what a Greek of historical times would regard as mere prudential concealments. That his attack on the suitors was not of a kind considered dishonourable, is evident from the conspiracy that recovered Thebes from the Spartans, when access was gained to them at a banquet by Thebans, in women's dresses. Epaminondas, indeed, refused to join in the scheme, but his morality was avowedly exceptional, and Pelopidas forfeited no man's respect by so doing. As to the injury Ulysses had sustained, the suitors had been preying on his defenceless wife and son, insulting every rite held most sacred, and laying an ambush against the life of Telemachus; and, for the slave women, treachery against their master and mistress was one of the worst crimes a Greek imagination could conceive. In like manner, the Trojan captives slain at the funeral pile of Patroclus, become another version of these many-coloured clouds of sunset, because we are told the Greeks did not use human sacrifices. What became of the nephews of Xerxes taken in the isle of Psyttaleia? And still later, how desirous were many Thebans to sacrifice a virgin at Leuctra.

Where the exact balance lies, no man will ever know. Mythology is mixed up of various streams, each of which has in turn had more than its due proportion assigned to it. Historical fact exaggerated was the old story, when Jupiter became a King of Crete, and Odin a northern conqueror. Abstract ideas personified next became the prevalent theory, and Power, Wisdom, Beauty, War, &c. were shown working out their attributes. Then followed the Christian habit of tracing the heathen tale to a Scriptural tradition, such as Hercules to Samson, Arion to Jonah; and at the present day the atmospherical theory, being the freshest, is swallowing up all the rest.

Now, to our mind all these have had their share in the work of creating the three great mythologies of the world—the Indian, the classical, and the northern. The original facts of the history of man, the Creation, the Promise of the woman-born Victor over the Serpent, the Deluge and the Tower of Babel, are of universal occurrence not only in the national legends of the Aryan race, but in those of almost every people that possessed any memory at all.

It is now said that the conquerors represent day, and the dragons darkness folded about the earth; but we believe that they go far deeper, and that actual Light and Darkness are themselves but another allegory of that conquest of all conquests, the hope of which upbore the world through the weary ages of waiting. Krishna bound in the serpent's coils, trampling its head, but wounded by it in the heel; Apollo standing radiant over Python; Hercules demolishing the Hydra; Sigurd rescuing the treasure from the Lindwurm Fafnir; all these embody the yearnings for Him who should bruise the Serpent's Head, just as the subsequent Christian myths of S. George, S. Martha, S. Margaret, and many more lesser and more local saints crystallize, as it were, the allegory of the disciples enabled to tread on serpents and scorpions, in their master's power. Mr. Henderson has regaled us with a splendid collection of "Worms of the North," no less than six, so authenticated that if only we were prepared to believe in the monsters' existence, we should really accept the tales as well proved!.

There was the Sockburn Worm, who was killed by the brave Conyers, with a falchion, wherewith every Bishop of Durham was presented by the Lord of Sockburn on his entrance into his diocese. The last time the ceremony was performed was in 1826, on the inauguration of Van Mildert, the last Bishop of Palatine. There was the Pollard Worm, which wonned in an oak wood near Bishop Auckland, and was killed by a knight named Pollard, who was rewarded by as much land as he could ride round during the Bishop's dinner; there was the Laidley Worm of Spindleston Heugh, a poor transformed maiden, who was rescued by her brother; the Linton Worm, the Dragon of Strathmartin, and the Lambton Worm, whose story is very circumstantial.

This monster, it appears, was evoked by the curses of the reckless young heir of Lambton, who was fishing in the Wear on a Sunday morning while his neighbours were going to mass, and pulled out so ugly a creature that he immediately detached it from his hook, and threw it into what is called the Worm Well. There it grew so large, and assumed so horrible an appearance, that the unhappy heir of Lambton could bear it no

longer, but went away-according to one legend, to the crusades, so as to be purified from his sins. In his absence, it increased so much that its length three times encircled an oval hill on the banks of the Wear, which still bears the name of the Worm's Hill. It committed all the true draconian ravages in the country, and was only kept in some sort of check by the ingenuity of the old steward of Lambton, who propitiated it by the offering daily of a trough filled with nine cows' milk. Of course, half the gentlemen of the country side tried to kill the monster, and were themselves destroyed, as the dragon had the power of reuniting when cut in two, and this lasted till the return of the unfortunate author of the mischief. He took counsel with a wise woman how to encounter the animal, and she advised him to array himself in armour spiked all over, and to stand in the middle of the river. Also, he was to take a vow that he would make a Jephtha-like sacrifice of the first thing he should meet after the victory. Otherwise, for nine generations no Lord of Lambton should die in his bed.

The Dragon's mode of attack seems to have been of the boaconstrictor kind, so the porcupine armour proved highly effective, and when it loosed itself from its over-close embrace, the knight, standing in the middle of the Wear, cut its coil in two so judiciously, that the current of the river carried off the lower half, and prevented it from reuniting, so that the upper portion was soon disposed of. In spite of all precautions, however, the first person to meet the victor was his poor old father, and thus it became needful to incur the doom, which seems to have been exactly verified. Two Lambtons were slain on the Royalist side in the great Rebellion, and the last, in whom the curse exhausted itself, was Henry Lambton, M.P., who died in his carriage on the 26th of June, 1761, while crossing the bridge across the Wear and Lambton. Counting nine lords of Lambton back from him, Yorkshire antiquaries arrived at John Lambton that slew ye Worme' who was Knight of Rhodes and Lord of Lambton.

No idea has been more deeply fixed among the people of all ages and times than this dragon-fight. And granting that here and there the tradition may have been refreshed by the discovery of saurian remains (though the above quoted northern tales do not occur in districts containing such relics), and that in a few cases such as that of Regulus, and the Knight of Rhodes, the enemy may have been a veritable serpent, yet still we think that it is the mysterious enmity between the serpent and the Woman, his seed and her seed, that has exalted the conflict to such a distinguished place in popular estimation.

The Rainbow is another subject of primæval tradition, univer

sally beloved among the children of Japhet and Shem; the lovely Iris, the messenger of the gods among the Greeks; the daughter of the Sun and of the flowers with the Welsh; and among the Northmen the bridge of Heaven, over which noble souls pass to the Valhalla; while the negro races regard the token of mercy as an evil spirit! Beyond these very earliest. primitive facts, we are convinced that the theory of distortions of Scripture breaks down. It was worked to the uttermost by many good men of the last century, in the same spirit in which they forced Hebrew into being the parent of other languages. Maurice's Ancient Hindostan and Davies's Celtic Researches are memorials of the vast erudition spent in building on insecure foundations.

The historical theory was the favourite with the Greeks and Romans themselves, when they had outgrown their simple credulity, and yet would not relinquish their divine and heroic ancestry. They knocked out and explained away the marvellous, and composed very rational and very dull histories of the migrations and conquests of their forefathers. Every nation goes through this stage of rationality just as every child discards its fairy tales, and then returns to them again with clearer eye-sight. Where the germ of truth lies, it is almost, if not quite, impossible to detect; but the examples of Attila, of Arthur, and of Charles the Great, convince us that there is no certainty that, because a personage occurs in a world of impossible and mythical companions and adventures, he should have never had a substantial existence, even though, like Arthur and Charles, his name should be strangely connected with the constellation Ursa Major.

The belief that many deities and many myths embody abstract ideas and qualities, is worked out to its utmost in Mr. Gladstone's Homer. His chapter upon Zeus, Athene, and Apollo, connecting Athene with Divine Wisdom, is a grand composition, and we believe that wherever the names may have come from, the Greek mind had added the idea. Zeus was indeed the sky, but he was also Almighty Power and Fatherhood; Athene was the Eastern Ahâna, or the Dawn, springing from her father's brow, but on this name all the traditional dreams of Divine Wisdom had clung; and Phoebus Apollo, though soiled even in the Homeric conception, and his purity given away to his sister, was the terrible, searching, healing, yet destroying light. And as the superior Greeks advanced in power of thought and philosophy, they would fain have made their deities more and more of embodiments of great ideas; but they were hampered by the atmospherical allegories which were attached to the names of their gods and heroes, and became monstrous and gross in creatures looked on as magnified human beings.