388 eepoet — 1879. 



interesting, but also most provoking part of Anthropology. More than twenty years 

 ago a famous essay, by Professor Max Miiller, made widely known in England bow 

 far the myths in the classical dictionary and the story-books of our own lands 

 might find their explanation in poetic nature-metaphors of sun and sky, cloud and 

 storm, such as are preserved in the ancient Aryan hymns of the Veda. Of 

 course it had been always known that the old gods and heroes were in some part 

 personifications of nature — that Helios and Okeanos, though they walked and 

 talked and begat sons and daughters, were only the Sun and Sea in poetic guise. 

 But the identifications of the new school went farther. The myth of Endymion 

 became the simple nature-story of the setting Sun meeting Selene the Moon ; and 

 I well remember how, at the Eoyal Institution, the aged scholar, Bishop Thirlwall, 

 grasped the stick he leant 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 personifica- 

 tion of the Dawn discovering 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 rnythologist a thousand years hence should explain the 

 tragic story of Mary Queen of Scots as a nature-myth of a beauteous Dawn rising 

 in splendour, 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 comparative mythology is foimded, 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 Hindu legend 

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

 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 often- 

 mentioned act is his crossing the airy regions in his three strides. ' Vishnu tra- 

 versed (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 civilised world there are many myths which may be 

 plainly traced to such poetic fancies before they have yet stiffened into circumstan- 

 tial tales ; and it is in following out these, rather than in recklessly guessing myth- 

 origins for every tradition, that the sound work of the rnythologist 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 Society, which has begun 

 its work so well, Mr. Lang gi res 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 naturalised iu England as ' Dick "Whittington 

 and his Oat.' 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 chariots and horses to bring the 

 dawn ; so that here the fortunate owner of Chanticleer has brought him to a good 

 market. Thus we see that the Breton peasant of our day has not even yet lost 

 the mythic sense with which his remote Aryan ancestors could behold the chariots 

 and horses of the dawn. But myth, though largely based on such half-playful 

 metaphor, runs through all the intermediate stages which separate poetic fancy 

 from crude philosophy embodied in stories seriously devised as explanations of real 

 facts. No doubt many legends of the ancient world, though not really history, are 

 myths which have arisen by reasoning on actual events, as definite as that which, 

 some four years ago, was terrifying the peasant mind in North Germany, and 

 especially in Posen. The report had spread far and wide that all Catholic children 

 with black hair and blue eyes were to be sent out of the country, some said to 



