Winter " what thinks Bootes of them, as he leads his Hunting 

 Stars. Dogs over the zenith in their leash of sidereal fire ? " 



Not, I may add in parenthesis, that the seekers 

 after astronomical knowledge should depend 

 on the poets and romancers for even an 

 untechnical accuracy. Literature, alas, is full 

 of misstatements concerning the moon and 

 stars. Few poets are accurate as Milton is 

 magnificently accurate, his rare slips lying 

 within the reach of a knowledge achieved 

 since his day : or as Tennyson is accurate. 

 Carlyle himself, quoted above in so beautiful a 

 passage, has made more than one strange 

 mistake for (as he once aspired to be) a student 

 astronomer : not only, as in one instance, 

 making the Great Bear for ever revolve round 

 Bootes, but, in a famous passage in his French 

 Revolution, speaking of Orion and the Pleiades 

 glittering serenely over revolutionary Paris on 

 the night of 9th August 1792, whereas, as some 

 fact-loving astronomer soon pointed out, Orion 

 did not on that occasion rise till daybreak. 

 It has been said of the Moon, in fiction, that 

 her crescents and risings and wan ings are to 

 most poets and novelists apparently an inex- 

 plicable mystery, an unattainable knowledge. 

 Even a writer who was also a seaman and 

 navigator, Captain Marryat, writes in one of 

 his novels of a waning crescent moon seen in 

 292 



