370 PROSE HALIETJTICS. 



honour of giving birth to Homer. The Macedonians 

 were proud of their eels ; Sicily was equally boastftd of 

 hers, especially of those in the neighbourhood of Syracuse; 

 the rivers Euclea and Eloris emulated each other in their 

 eels ; one might have expected to hear of such meandering 

 fish delighting in the wanderings of the Meander, and 

 Phrygia accordingly produced abundant supplies ; so did 

 the Thracian Strymon, and other habitats too numerous 

 to name ; but ancient fame has assigned to Bceotia that 

 pre-eminence which was so keenly contested by aU 

 these places. And had eels been as sacrosanct there as 

 in Egypt, noble temples no doubt would have been raised 

 to them among its swamps, with some architraval inscrip- 

 tion similar to that on the Paris Pantheon ; ' Aux grandes 

 AnguDles la patrie reconnaissante ; ' whilst at a time when 

 mythology was so little select, that a god Rubigus and a 

 goddess Rubigo sat representatives of blight and mildew 

 at Jupiter's board, the Boeotians might have added the 

 eel as another ccelicola to the motley assembly of their 

 sky, without anybody's finding fa\ilt with such ichthyo- 

 logical canonization. They did not however go so far, 

 but, having crowned their eels for sacrifice, were satisfied 

 to throw over them the usual salted cake, and to conclude 

 the ceremony of immolation with a devout prayer to the 

 gods of this time-honoured rite ; though they seem not to 

 have understood the motive, yet they never questioned 

 the wisdom. ' It was enough for them,' they said, like 

 true Rechabites as they were, ' to follow all that their 

 fathers and grandfathers had commanded, and to main- 

 tain inviolate so old a tradition;' but if pressed unduly in 

 the matter by a stranger witnessing the ceremony to de- 

 clare its meaning, 'they would,' says Anaxandrides, 'turn 

 sharply upon the querist, and teU him they were not going 

 to explain the customs of their ancestors to barbarians ; 

 in fact, in the spirit, if not in the words of Shakspeare's 

 doughty knight, ' They'd give no man reasons on com- 



