1885.-1886.. 44' 



than to purely natural emblems. It cannot be said that artists 

 at any period have succeeded, even in a remote degree, in em- 

 bodying the highly wrought descriptions of the poets, of the 

 terrible creatures of the imagination. *' The poet's pen" may 

 turn them into shapes (shadows at the best), but the artist, who; 

 follows the poet, finds it totally beyond his art to give material 

 form and expression to his conception with anything like 

 photographic fidelity. Such beings prefer the dim light of 

 allegory to the clear sunlight of reason, and shrink from closer 

 inspection. Like all spectres they are most effective in the 

 dark. Illusions of the mind have from the twilight of history, 

 and all through the dim and credulous ages past, performed 

 an important part in influencing the thoughts, habits, and 

 lives of mankind. Over many lands these inherited ideas still 

 exercise a paramount influence ; but in the enlightenment of 

 the coming time it is probable they will fade away like an evil 

 dream, and the memories of their name and influence alone 

 remain. 



It is just possible there may be a basis of truth in the con- 

 ception of some of the fabled monsters of antiquity, in the 

 great birds and beasts long since extinct, whose remains geo- 

 logical science unearths for the wonderment of our times. In 

 the existing representatives of the antediluvian saurians, the 

 crocodile and alligator, we see the prototypes of the dragons 

 and hydras of poetic fancy. "Among the geological specimens 

 in the British Museum," says Hugh Miller, " the visitor sees 

 shapes that more than rival in strangeness the great dragons 

 and griffins of mediaeval legends; enormous jaws, bristling with 

 pointed teeth, gape horrid, in stone, under startling eye-sockets 

 a foot in diameter ; and necks that half equal in length the 

 entire body of a boa-constrictor. And here we see a winged 

 dragon that, armed with sharp teeth and strong claws, has 

 careered through the air on leathern wings like those of a 

 bat." We are also told in the sacred Scriptures by Moses of 

 " fiery serpents," and by Isaiah of a " fiery flying serpent." Other 

 monsters — dragons, cockatrices, and some of whose form we 

 have no conception — are also mentioned. Euripides describes 



