RECENT AXTHROPOLOGY. 155 



remember how, at the Royal Institution, the aged scholar. Bishop 

 Thirlwall, grasped the stick he leaned on, as if to make sure of the 

 ground under his feet, when he heard it propounded that Erinys, the 

 dread avenger of murder, was a personification of the Dawn discover- 

 ing the deeds of Darkness. Though the study of mythology has grown 

 apace in these later years, and many of its explanations will stand the 

 test of future criticism, I am bound to say that mythologists, always 

 an erratic race, have of late been making wilder work than ever with 

 both myth and real history — finding mythic suns and skies in the kings 

 and heroes of old tradition, with dawns for love-tales, storms for wars, 

 and sunsets for deaths, often with as much real cogency as if some my- 

 thologist a thousand years hence should explain the tragic story of 

 Mary Queen of Scots as a nature-myth of a beauteous dawn rising in 

 splendor, prisoned in a dark cloud-island, and done to death in blood- 

 red sunset. Learned treatises have of late, by such rash guessings, 

 shaken public confidence in the more sober reasonings on which com- 

 parative mythology is founded, so that it is well to insist that there 

 are cases where the derivation of myths from poetic metaphors is 

 really proved beyond doubt. Such an instance is the Hindoo legend of 

 King Bali, whose austerities have alarmed the gods themselves, when 

 Yamana, a Brahmanic Tom Thumb, begs of him as much land as he 

 can measure in three steps ; but when the boon is granted, the tiny 

 dwarf expands gigantic into Vishnu himself, and striding with one step 

 across the earth, with another across the air, and a third across the 

 sky, drives the king down into the infernal regions, where he still 

 reigns. There are various versions of the story, of which one may be 

 read in Southey ; but in the ancient Vedic hymns its origin may be 

 found when it was not as yet a story at all, only a poetic metaphor of 

 Vishnu, the Sun, whose oft-mentioned act is his crossing the airy re- 

 gions in his three strides. " Vishnu traversed (the earth), thrice he 

 put down his foot ; it was crushed under his dusty step. Three steps 

 hence made Vishnu, unharmed preserver, upholding sacred things." 

 Both in the savage and civilized world there are many myths which 

 may be plainly traced to such poetic fancies before they have yet 

 stiffened into circumstantial tales ; and it is in following out these, 

 rather than in recklessly guessing myth-origins for every tradition, 

 that the sound work of the mythologist lies. The scholar must not 

 treat such nature-poetry like prose, spoiling its light texture with too 

 heavy a grasp. In the volume published by our new Folk-Lore So- 

 ciety, which has begun its work so well, Mr. Lang gives an instance of 

 the sportive nature-metaphor which still lingers among popular story- 

 tellers. It is Breton, and belongs to that wide-spread tale of which 

 one version is naturalized in England as " Dick Whittington and his 

 Cat." .The story runs thus : The elder brother has the cat, while the 

 next brother, who has a cock left him, fortunately finds his way to a 

 land where (there being no cocks) the king has every night to send 



