THE LION OF ANDROCLES 99 



the Princess of the Sleeping Ogre, and straightway the 

 Prince, her lover, sets off on his travels and finds a bag 

 which holds a net that catches a fish which has swallowed 

 a bird, and in the bird is a grain of corn, and so on till life 

 is run to death at last. 



Whence came it, this creed that to find Life you must 

 seek it out of the Body ? The drowned face of it looks up, 

 and is silent as the dead. 



To return, however, to the Lion as King of the Bestiary 

 with the Virgin on one side of him, and the Crab on the 

 other — the Crab which in old times showed as two sacred 

 beetles, those far-seeing Egyptian scarabs who make earth 

 arks for their young ones ere the floods come to the Nile. 



For the Lion was the great water sign, and still holds 

 its own in the matter of symbolism in many a modern foun- 

 tain or waterspout. 



It is a quaint kingdom over which the Lion rules among 

 the Stars, and where he holds court with half the legends of 

 the world. The Passover Lamb is his subject. The Bow 

 of Promise in the Skies which ends the Deluge-bringer's 

 tyranny belongs to him. The Virgin-mother and her 

 heavenly Twins, the man child and the woman child, the 

 Three who are really One, look up to him. Even 

 the Bull-type of the great Osiris circles with him, and the 

 Fishes tell their tale of the Pool-of-Two waters as they 

 swim. 



" I have come like the sun from the House of the 

 Lions" boasts Osiris, Redeemer of the Living and the 

 Dead ; and from that admission no doubt, has come about 

 the belief in the royalty of lineage of the Lion, a belief 

 which survives in Shakespeare's line " The lion will not 



H 2 



