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pensing weal or wo. The general notion of a in the description of foreign regions he had free-
damon comprehended every species of myste-ly indulged his fancy, his expositors only wasted
rious, supernatural agency, which the imagina- their time in labouring to reconcile his accounts
tion had not conceived under a distinct form, with later discoveries. Strabo himself profess-
and afforded a basis for the personifying of all, es to observe a mean between this irreverent
abstract properties and relations, by which they criticism and the excessive zeal of those who
acquired an influence over the feelings, inde- ragarded Homer as a master of all arts and
pendent of poetical fancy. Whatever, either in sciences; yet, rather than admit that he was
nature or in man, excited admiration or won- not acquainted with the rudiments of geogra-
der by its excellence or singularity, was con- phy, he does not scruple to put the most vio-
sidered as partaking of this character. With-lent construction on his words, and to draw
out entering into this feeling, we shall be una-
ble to comprehend the prodigality with which
heroic honours were conferred by the Greeks,
as when we find the people of Segesta erecting
a chapel, and instituting sacrifices at the grave
of a slain enemy, with no other motive than his
extraordinary beauty. The heroes, with whom
the notion of a dæmon was thus associated, ap-
proach very near to the fairies and goblins of
other mythologies. Greek superstition repre-
sented them as always active, sometimes be-
neficent, but not unfrequently wanton and mis-
chievous.

the most improbable inferences from them.
At present, perhaps, there is more danger of
pushing the opinion of Eratosthenes too far,
than of running into the opposite extreme.
Some modern writers seem to have assigned
too narrow limits to Homer's knowledge of the
earth; and they have, perhaps, sometimes forgot-
ten that his conceptions of its unknown regions,
and of the rest of the universe, were probably
very vague and indefinite as well as erroneous,
and have attributed a precision and consistency
to his views which he may never have aimed
at. On the other hand, it may be fairly assu-

We have dwelt the more largely on this sub-med that his descriptions of these objects are ject here, because the changes which took place in the Greek religion after the age of Homer affect its external aspect rather than its essential character. Its relation, indeed, to the state, to science, and to morality, did not continue always the same: as fresh avenues opened for commerce with foreign regions, some new objects of worship were introduced: the progress of wealth and art multiplied and refined its rites; but the germe, at least, of every important religious principle and institution is visible in the Homeric poems.

IV. It is not our intention fully to describe the state of knowledge and of the arts in the heroic ages, or to combine all the scattered touches by which Homer has illustrated it, into a picture as complete as they might enable us to form. We must confine ourselves to selecting a few of the most striking, which may serve to mark the limits of the progress which the Greeks of this period had made in intellectual acquirements, and in their application to the purposes of life.

not mere poetical fictions, and that, if they do
not exactly represent the popular opinion, they
are never without some groundwork of general
belief. The Homeric cosmology is just such a
scheme as might have been expected to be
formed by men who gaze upon nature with un-
hesitating confidence in the intimations of their
senses, and are satisfied with the rudest expe-
dients for explaining and reconciling them, and
who willingly allow their imagination to range
beyond the bounds of their experience in search
of the marvellous.

If we begin by endeavouring to ascertain the extent of the poet's geographical knowledge, we find ourselves almost confined to Greece and the Ægean. Beyond this circle all is foreign and obscure: and the looseness with which he describes the more distant regions, especially when contrasted with his accurate delineation of those which were familiar to him, indicates that, as to the others, he was mostly left to depend on vague rumours, which he might mould at his pleasure. In the catalogue, indeed, of the Trojan auxiliaries, which probaA just but indiscriminating veneration for bly comprises all the information which the Homer's genius led the Greeks of later times, Greeks had acquired concerning that part of when science and erudition flourished, but the the world at the time it was composed, the spirit of poetry was nearly extinct, to form names of several nations in the interior of Asia very exaggerated notions of his learning. They Minor are enumerated. The remotest are probcould not bring themselves to believe that the ably the Halizonians of Alybé, whose country divine bard, who for so many centuries had may, as Strabo supposes, be that of the Chalfashioned the mind of Greece, whose wisdom deans on the Euxine. On the southern side of they had been accustomed to revere from their the peninsula, the Lycians appear as a very infancy, should have been ignorant of things distant race, whose land is therefore a fit scene which, in their own day, were familiar to the for fabulous adventures: on its confines are vulgar, and that his conceptions of the objects the haunts of the monstrous Chimæra, and the which lay beyond the narrow range of his knowl- territory of the Amazons; farther eastward, edge should have been at once mean and ex- the mountains of the fierce Solymi, from which travagant to a degree which a more enlighten- Poseidon, on his return from the Ethiopians, ed age finds it difficult to comprehend. Strabo descries the bark of Ulysses sailing on the employs a considerable space in the introducto-western sea. These Ethiopians are placed by ry part of his work to refute Eratosthenes, the poet at the extremity of the earth; but as who had presumed to inaintain that the poet's aim was merely to afford entertainment, that his geographical information was confined to the countries inhabited by Greeks, and that, as

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they are visited by Menelaus in the course
of his wanderings, they must be supposed to
reach across the shores of the inner sea, and
to border on the Phoenician and it is prob-
able that the poet assigned no great extent

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to the intermediate tract. We find no intima- countries may have been, his description of tion that Menelaus left his ships on the coast them is extremely well fitted to excite curiosity of Syria to nenetrate inland. Nestor, indeed, concerning them in his countrymen, and to imspeaks of this voyage of Menelaus in terms pel the spirit of adventure in this direction. which, at first sight, might seem to indicate With the opposite quarters of the world the rethat the regions he visited were quite out of the verse is the case. They are either wrapped in reach of ordinary Greek navigation: "He has obscurity, or presented under a forbidding asjust returned from parts whence a man could pect, as only to be approached through the never hope to return, when once driven into a midst of perils, which make the courage of the sea so vast and fearful, that even the birds hardiest quail. Strabo argues that Homer must come not back within the same year." This, have been acquainted with the Cimmerian Boshowever, is an exaggeration, which indicates porus, because he speaks of the Cimmerians as only the timidity of the Greek mariners, not an a people on the margin of Ocean, near the enerroneous conception of the distance. For trance of the lower world, who are covered with elsewhere we find Ulysses describing a voyage perpetual mist and cloud, and never see the which he performed in five days, from Crete to light of the sun. In like manner, he concludes Egypt and the Taphians, though they inhabit that the poet, who has mentioned the European the western side of Greece, are represented as Mysians, cannot have been a stranger to the engaged in piratical adventures on the coast of Danube. Yet he elsewhere remarks, that in Phonica. On the other hand, one general the time of Homer the Euxine was regarded as idea, which the poet frequently expresses with another ocean, and those who sailed into it were regard to these eastern lands, can scarcely have thought to roam into as distant a region as those been derived from the experience of his coun- who proceeded beyond the Pillars of Hercules. trymen. He describes their inhabitants as not In fact, it appears highly probable, from the manonly abounding in wealth, but in the highest ner in which Homer describes the voyage of degree hospitable and munificent. The palace the Argonauts, that he was ignorant of the exof Menelaus is filled with the precious presents istence of the northern shores of the Euxine, which he has collected during his stay in the and supposed Jason to have sailed from the land East; and, in the story told by Ulysses, though of Eetes, round the north of Greece and Italy, his comrades have provoked the Egyptians by into the western sea. In later times the Argoplundering their fields, and he surrenders him- nauts were made to go up the Danube, and then self a prisoner, yet not only is his life spared to descend by another arm into the Adriatic. by the king, but he is loaded with treasures by But Homer was probably not so well informed the people. It is, perhaps, of less moment that as to see any need for such a fiction. On the the Phoenicians and Egyptians mentioned have, western side of Europe, the compass of his for the most part, purely Greek names. But as knowledge seems to be bounded by a few points to Egypt, it seems clear that the poet's infor- not very far distant from the coast of Greece. mation was confined to what he had heard of a A modern writer has even attempted to prove river Egyptus, and a great city called Thebes. that the author of the Odyssey was so imperOf its distance from the mouth of the river he fectly acquainted with the group of islands seems to have no distinct conception. The among which the kingdom of Ulysses lay, as to fertility of the soil is marked by an abundant assign a totally false position to Ithaca itself.* growth of poisonous and medicinal herbs, and It seems, however. possible to reconcile his dethe wisdom of the people by their skill in the scriptions accurately enough with its real site.† healing art, in which they are said to excel the The northern part of the Adriatic he appears, rest of mankind. He mentions the Isle of Pha- as we have observed, to consider as a vast open ros, but places it at a day's sail from the mouth sea. The opinion which has generally prevailof the river, and Strabo, to save his credit, is ed among both the ancients and the moderns, forced to suppose that he meant to intimate the that in describing the marvellous island of the enlargement of the Delta, which Menelaus Phæacians he had Corcyra in view, seems to might have heard of, and which might have in- have no better foundation than the desire of asduced him to substitute the distance by which signing a definite locality to the poet's fictions: Pharos had once been separated from the coast as, in the same object, great pains have been for that at which he must himself have found taken to investigate the abodes of Circe and of What part of Africa Menelaus is conceived Calypso. The situation of Corcyra may have to have visited does not appear. He describes been very well known to him; but it was not it as a fortunate land, in which the ewes yean that which he required for his Phæacians; and twice a year, and the lambs are horned from hence no conclusion can be safely drawn either their birth. The position of the part of Libya for or against his geographical learning, from where Ulysses found the Lotus-eaters, whose the freedom with which he has painted the wonfavourite fruit still grows under the name of the ders of their island. Farther westward, Sicily Jujube, on the same coast, is more precisely fixed by its vicinity to the land of the Cyclops; from which it seems that the poet imagined less than a day's voyage to intervene between Sicily and the nearest point of Africa. It seems to be implied that a regular traffic subsisted between Libya and Phoenicia.*

it.

On the whole, we may observe, and it is a remark of some importance, that whatever Homer's knowledge of these eastern and southern

295.

The

Voelker, Ueber Homerische Geographie, c. iv. most valuable work on this subject after Voss. It is also very learnedly treated by Ukert, Geographie der Griechen u. Roemer, vol. i.

This is the object of a little work, Ueber das Homerische Ithaka, by R. V. L. Ruehle von Lilienstern.

This has been lately very satisfactorily shown by Professor Welcker, in a most ingenious and interesting essay on Homer's Phracians, in the new series of the Rheinisches

Museum, i., 2. But I find it very difficult to assent to his position, which he adopts apparently only on etymological grounds, that the poet does not mean to represent Schena as an island.

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woman, torn from the body of her husband, who had just fallen in defence of his city, and hurried along by the captors, who quicken her steps by striking her on the back and shoulders with their spears.* Yet the sanctuaries of the gods sometimes afforded an asylum which was respected on these occasions by the conquerors. Thus Maro, the priest of Apollo, was saved, with his family, from the common destruction, in which the Ciconians of Ismarus were involved by Ulysses; for he dwelt within the precincts sacred to the god yet he redeemed himself by a heavy ransom. The priest of Apollo who occasions the quarrel in the Iliad was not so fortunate: he loses his daughter in the sack of Thebé, and only recovers her through the extraordinary interference of the god.

thing was to him absolutery passive and inert; in all the objects around him he found life, or readily imparted it to them out of the fulness of his own imagination. This was not a poetical view, the privilege of extraordinary minds, but the popular mode of thinking and feeling, cherished undoubtedly by the bold forms, and abrupt contrasts, and all the natural wonders of a mountainous and sea-broken land. A people so disposed and situate is not immediately impelled to seek a single universal source of being. The teeming earth, the quickening sun, the restless sea, the rushing stream, the irresistible storm, every display of superhuman might which it beholds, rouses a distinct sentiment of religious awe. Everywhere it finds deities, which, however, may not for a long time be distinguish. ed by name from the objects in which their presence is manifested. In the Iliad, Agamemnon is calling on the gods to witness a solemn contract. Among those of Olympus he names none but Jupiter; after him he invokes the allseeing, all-hearing sun, the rivers, the earth, and, lastly, the gods who punish perjured men in the realms below. In like manner, we may suppose the Pelasgians to have worshipped the invisible powers, which, according to the primitive belief of the people, animated the various forms of the sensible world.

III. It has sometimes been made a question whether polytheism or monotheism is the more ancient form of natural religion. This is one of those inquiries, grounded on the contemplation of human nature in the abstract, which can scarcely ever lead to any safe conclusion. The form which the religious impressions of a people assume, so far as they are not determined by tradition or example, must depend on the character and condition of each community. Some tribes of the human race appear to receive from the sensible world only a single dim, That such was, in fact, the eldest form of reundefined feeling of religious awe, which sug-ligion which prevailed among the Pelasgian gests to them the existence of a superior pow-tribes, is both highly probable in itself, and coner. A monotonous sameness in the aspect of nature, a uniform tenour of life, broken only by the exertions necessary to satisfy the simplest animal wants, probably tend to perpetuate such a state of glimmering consciousness, which, however, is something very remote from that view of nature which is the foundation of a monotheistic religion. It is, however, equally conceivable and consistent with experience, that a people of quick sense and fancy, especially if placed in a region marked by various and striking features, may associate its earliest religious emotions with the multiplicity of surrounding objects, and may no sooner awake to the consciousness of its situation, than it begins to people its universe with a corresponding multi-was, that, with a few exceptions, they had all tude of imaginary agents.

How far either of these suppositions applies to the earliest inhabitants of Greece, is a question on which little certain information can reasonably be expected from history. The most ancient direct testimony, if an opinion may be so called, on the subject, is that of Herodotus, or, rather, that of the priests of Dodona, from whom he heard that the Pelasgians once sacrificed only to nameless deities. Whatever may be the authority of this evidence, its meaning is doubtful; but the least probable of all the inferences that have been drawn from it is, that the Pelasgians worshipped a single god. The words of Herodotus admit of a very different interpretation, which is confirmed by all the traces of the primitive religion to be found in the later Greek mythology. We have no reason for imagining that the first inhabitants of Greece were differently constituted, as to their aptitude for religious impressions, from those who succeeded them. The Greek was formed to sympathize strongly with the outward world: no* Od., viii., 528.

firmed by the example of the ancient Persians. In this sense, therefore, we both can understand, and may accept, the statement of Herodotus. But it is not quite so easy to follow him when he attempts to trace the steps by which this simple creed was transformed into the complicated system of the Greek mythology, He seems to distinguish two great changes which the Greek religion underwent one produced by the introduction of foreign deities and rites, the other by the invention of native poets. His researches had, as he says, convinced him that all the names of the Greek gods had been derived from the barbarians; and the result of the information which he had gathered in Egypt

:

been transplanted from that country. Some the Egyptian priests themselves disclaimed; but the rest had, as they asserted, been always known among them; and hence Herodotus infers that the excepted names had been invented by the Pelasgians, all but that of Poseidon, the god of the sea, which had been brought over from Africa. It seems necessary to suppose that, by the names of the gods, both Herodotus and his instructers understood their nature and attributes, and that they conceived the Egyptian appellations to have been translated into equiv alent Greek words. But this testimony, or judg ment of Herodotus, combined with the various traditions of Oriental colonies planted in Greece, at a time when its inhabitants are supposed to have wanted the first rudiments of civilization, with the priestly institutions of the East, the presumed antiquity of the Greek mysteries, and of esoteric doctrines transmitted by them, and coincidences observed in several features of the Greek and the Egyptian mythology, has formed the ground of a hypothesis which is still a subject of earnest controversy. It assumes that

long familiar to the people: and it is only when Homer and Hesiod are considered as representatives of a whole line of poets, who were the organs and interpreters of the popular creed, and thus gradually determined its permanent form, that this opinion of Herodotus can appear at all reasonable.

Though Herodotus couples Homer and Hesiod together, as if they had lived in the same age, and had co-operated towards the same end, not only were they probably separated by a considerable number of generations, but their

the Homeric poems the history of the divine persons introduced is foreign to the main subject, and is only mentioned in casual allusions; while the professed design of Hesiod's Theogogods. It contains a series of rude speculations on the universe, in which its several parts are personified, and the order of their production represented under the figure of successive genhis subject suggests a strong suspicion that this Theogony, or cosmogony, was not the fruit of his own invention; and that, although to us it breathes the first lispings of Greek philosophy, they are only the faint echoes of an earlier and deeper strain. Indeed, the Homeric poems themselves contain allusions which disclose an acquaintance with such theories; as when Ocean is termed the origin of the gods and of all things, though Jupiter is commonly described as the father of gods and men. The Theogony, compared with the hints furnished by Herodotus, and with the tradition of a great body of sacred poetry ascribed to the ancient bards already mentioned; who preceded Homer and Hesiod perhaps by many centuries, has given rise to an opinion that the Greek mythology was derived from philosophical speculations, which in course of time had been misunder

the colonies which migrated into Greece in the darkness of the old Pelasgian period were headed by priests, who long retained the supreme power in their new settlements. They brought with them the faith and the wisdom which they had inherited in their ancient seats, the knowledge of one God, the hidden spring of life and intelligence, but infinitely diversified in his attributes, functions, and emanations. These they proposed to the veneration of the ignorant multitude, not in their naked simplicity, which would have dazzled and confounded those unenlightened minds, but through the veil of ex-works belong to totally different classes. In pressive symbols and ingenious fables, which were accepted by the people as literal truths, and were gradually wrought into a complicated mythological system. The sublime dogmas of the priestly religion were reserved for the cho-ny is to relate the origin of the world and the sen few, who were capable of contemplating them in their pure and simple form, and these alone understood the epithets and images which, in the poetry of the temples, conveyed the tenets of the ancient theology. When these priest-erations. The manner in which the poet treats ly governments were everywhere forced to give way to the rule of the heroic chieftains, as the priests themselves drew back into the shade, so their doctrines were more and more confined to the recesses of their sanctuaries, and were revealed only to those who were admitted to the rites there celebrated in awful obscurity. Meanwhile a new race of poets started up, and gained the ear of the people-bards who, blending heroic legends with religious fables, the original meaning of which had been lost, introduced fresh confusion into the mythical chaos. The troubles that accompanied the Dorian invasion contributed to widen the breach between the popular and the priestly religion: the latter, however, was preserved without any material alteration in the mysteries, which continued to be the vehicles of the more enlightened faith down to the latest days of paganism. Before we make any remark on this hypoth-stood, distorted, and blended with heterogeneesis, we must consider the view which Herodotus takes of the change introduced by native poets into the Greek mythology: "Whence each of the gods sprang, and whether all of them were always existing, and what were their shapes, on these points the knowledge of the Greeks may be said to be but of yesterday." And he subjoins, as a reason, the comparatively late age of Homer and Hesiod, who, as he says, "were the authors of the Greek theogony, gave titles to the gods, distinguished their attributes and functions, and described their forms. For the poets, who are said to have been more ancient than these two, were, in my opinion, more recent." This last remark seems only intended to condemn the many spurious works which were current in his time, under the names of Linus, Orpheus, Museus, Pamphus, Olen, and other bards, who were believed to have sung before Homer. But, besides this critical judgment, he undoubtedly expresses his conviction that Homer and Hesiod had effected an important revolution in the religious belief of their countrymen. This revolution, indeed, is so great, that it could not, with any probability, be ascribed to the genius of one or two poets, even if the Homeric poems did not clearly indicate that their descriptions are founded on conceptions of the Divine nature which had been

ous fictions. According to this view, some elder poet had described the successive stages of the world's history by a series of terms, which, though they sounded like names of persons, yet to an intelligent mind conveyed only those attributes of the various objects enumerated on which, in the poet's conception, their mutual relation depended. This series Hesiod preserved in the main, though broken by occasional interpolations, but without comprehending its real import. Etymology alone, it is supposed, can furnish the clew to this labyrinth, and enable the inquirer to trace the Greek theology to its fountain head, where it will be found to spring up in the simple form of physical speculation. But its purity was soon troubled, when the vulgar, easily deceived by the slight figurative disguise of the language, and incapable of perceiving the coherence of the whole system, began to attribute real life and personality to each of its parts; and thus arose a wild, disjointed mythology, which was continually receiving additions from the fancy of the popular poets, and nourished a blind and gross superstition, which the ancient sage who unwittingly laid its foundation so little dreamed of, that if he himself believed in any Divine nature, he had carefully excluded it from his system.*

Briefe ueber Homer und Hesiodus of Hermann and

ed of the gods, differed widely in different regions, so in each region it might be long before the spheres of the several deities were fixed, and their characters and attributes determined. And it may even be imagined that such a period answers best to that which Herodotus describes, of the nameless gods. To distinguish the prov

were brought down from their spheres and invested with a human form; the other that by which the local deities of the several tribes were reconciled and united in one family. Each of these steps must have occupied a long period; and it is not necessary to suppose that the one began after the other had ended. The Pierian Thracians seem to have been the people in whose poetry Olympus was first celebrated as the common seat of the gods, and hence to

We have been induced to notice these mod-nature, and, consequently, the conceptions formern views of the subject because they profess to rest in part on the authority of Herodotus, and to illustrate his meaning. We can only touch very briefly on the reasons which lead us to a different conclusion. The authority of Herodotus is, in fact, little more than that of his guides, the Egyptian priests, whose judgment certainly cannot be thought decisive on the ori-inces and functions of the divine agents was a gin of a foreign mythology, with which they task which might have afforded ample employmust have been very imperfectly acquainted, ment to many generations of sacred bards, who, and which, even if their information had been however, must be considered only as the organs sufficiently extensive and accurate, their na- and expounders of the popular views and feeltional prejudices, as well as those of their sta-ings. But still two important steps remained tion, must have prevented them from viewing in the formation of the Greek mythology. The in its true light. The correctness, therefore, of one was that by which the invisible powers the interpretation by which several of the national gods of Greece were identified with objects of Egyptian worship, is still a questionable point, only to be determined by proofs, which do not appear to have been yet established, of such a coincidence as could not have been produced either by an original national community of religious impressions, or by a later, studied or accidental, conformity in their outward signs. Independently of such proofs, or of other evidence, there is very little either in the charac-them may probably be ascribed the greatest ter or the fables of the Greek deities that raises share in the process of combination and adjustany suspicion of a foreign origin, or that may ment, which led to that unity which the Honot be referred to well-known elements in the in- meric poems represent as complete. But it tellectual and moral constitution of the Greeks. appears to have been in the heroic age, and in On the other hand, what has been said in a pre- that school of poetry which arose out of the ceding chapter may serve to render it credible, new spirit of these times, that the principle of if not highly probable, that the religions of the personification was most active in exhibiting East very early exerted some influence on that the gods in human shape, and in drawing them of Greece, and even that Egypt may have con- forth from the awful obscurity in which they tributed to this effect, not, however, directly, had been before shrouded, into familiar interbut only through the intervention of a different course with mankind. And this may, perhaps, people. But that any colonies were led into be properly considered as the most prominent Greece by priests, who were elevated above the contrast between the Pelasgian and the Hellenvulgar by sacred learning or religious philoso-ic period, as to their religious character. phy, is in itself little more than a dream, and is Though in general the Greek religion may particularly improbable with regard to the sup-be correctly described as a worship of nature, posed Egyptian settlers, both for reasons already given, and because, among the sages who are celebrated as the earliest instructers of the Greeks, though many are represented as foreigners, none are connected with Egypt. The institution of the mysteries does not require any such supposition; and it is extreme-personified abstractions, but who may rather be ly doubtful whether any esoteric doctrines were ever delivered in them.

We therefore believe that the religion of the Greeks was in the main purely home-sprung. But the supposition that their mythology was derived from the observations and reflections of some superior minds, which determined the creed of the vulgar, seems repugnant to all analogy, as well as to all internal evidence; and it is in a totally different sense that we should be inclined to adopt the opinion of Herodotus, that poets were the authors of the popular theology. We think it probable, as has been already intimated, that the deities of the earliest Pelasgian period were those whose presence and power appeared to be displayed in the various operations of nature. But as the aspects of

Creuzer. The most important of the modern mythological systems and views are accurately and impartially described by Mueller, in his Prolegomena. To the writers there enumerated may be added Gerhard, Grundzuege der Archæolo gie, in the first part of the Hyperboreisch Roemische Studien.

and most of its deities corresponded either to certain parts of the sensible world, or to certain classes of objects comprehended under abstract notions, it is by no means clear that several tribes did not acknowledge tutelary gods, who were neither imbodied powers of nature nor

said to have grown out of the character and history of the community itself, and to have represented nothing but its general consciousness of dependance on a superior Being. No instances, perhaps, can be produced which are not ambiguous; but the supposition is both probable in itself, and serves to explain some seeming incongruities in the Greek theology. Most of those fables which offended both the Christian fathers and the Greek philosophers, by the debasing conceptions they suggest of the Divine nature, and which still render it dif ficult to convey the knowledge of the Greek mythology without danger of polluting the youthful imagination,* were undoubtedly of physical origin. But by the side of these we find titles and descriptions which express very pure and exalted notions of the gods and of their relation to mankind, and which may have sprung from the other source just mentioned.

It is one among the many merits of Mr Keightley's Mythology, that he has skilfully steered clear of this danger.

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