The Solar Theory of Myths. 



59 



paradise, awed by the flaming sword of the angel that 

 guarded the gate. 



Here, as they thought, was Ultima Thule, and retracing 

 their steps, they filled the lon<^ way over which they had 

 traveled with the monuments of the fancied mortals who 

 had made the past illustrious, till the historic page was 

 filled with the record of princes who had never lived, and 

 the historic world crowded with the mausolea of heroes 

 who had never died. But, though overshadowed by the 

 new learning, and crowded out by the new religion, the 

 deities of the old world had filled too great a place to be 

 easily forgotten. The grandest conceptions of architecture 

 were crystalized in the walls of their temples ; the grace 

 and majesty, which the modern world admires but cannot 

 rival, were embodied in their marble forms ; the noble 

 simplicity of the epic, the terrible grandeur of tragedy and 

 the light imagery of comedy were grouped about their 

 divine proportions. They were still mighty, though fallen. 

 The historian and the philosopher seized upon the ruins 

 of the old-world pantheon, and each in his way used its 

 materials for the building of his own edifice. And hence 

 arose two methods in the interpretation of myths which we 

 may term the allegorical and the historical. Of those who 

 held to the former, or allegorical, Aristotle very naturally 

 concluded that the strange creations were but the attempts 

 of the world before him to express their philosophical 

 speculations; Plutarch, that they were metaphysical state- 

 ments in disguise ; Thucydides inclined to the idea that 

 they might be explanations of the course of nature ; Cicero 

 that a great part of them were but natural powers personi- 

 fied ; Sallust that they were mysteries — in which opinion 

 most'people probably concurred; while Sir Francis Bacon 

 had, of course, an original solution : proved, conclusively 

 to himself at least, that they were moral maxims dressed 

 up in allegory, and then showed what ingenuity could ac- 

 complish by finding the moral in some thirty of the most 



