of the Assyrian Monarchy. 325 
rendered tangible, that the human passions 
and adventures were symbolical and not real, 
that the names were epithets of divinities, 
not names of men, and that thus the Pantheon 
should have been converted into a gallery of 
history ? Is it not agreeable to the progress 
of fiction in other cases, that when once the 
idea of the gods having been sovereigns of 
the countries where they were worshipped 
was adopted, those who successively wrought 
up the original materials should drop more 
and more of the circumstances which could 
not be made to assume an historical air, bend 
those which they retained more and more 
to the shape of history, and add more of 
those details which were necessary to give 
fulness and connection to the story? We 
need not, however, rest upon these presump- 
tions that history would undergo such cor- 
ruptions; we have positive proof that it has 
been subject to them. In Herodotus, who 
wrote when the Egyptians had not materially 
corrupted their own history, we find Osiris 
and Isis represented not as human beings, but 
as divinities answering to the Bacchus and 
Ceres of the Greeks: but in Diodorus Sica- 
lus, who lived in the Augustan age, they are 
converted into historical personages, a king 
and queen of Egypt. Osiris invents agricul- 
