ever, to enable the reader to enter into his exposition of the fable of Endymion, which will sufficiently illustrate his theory; and which, as we have Bacon's exposition to contrast it with, will serve better than anything else to exhibit the difference between the rival methods of interpretation.

"We can best enter," says he, "into the original meaning of a Greek mythe, when some of the persons who act in it have preserved names intelligible in Greek. When we find the names of Eos, Selene, Helios, or Herse, we have words which tell their own. story, and we have a о or for the rest of the mythe. Let us take the beautiful mythe of Selene and Endymion. Endymion is the son of Zeus and Kalyke, but he is also the son of Aethlios, a king of Elis, who is himself called a son of Zeus, and whom Endymion is said to have succeeded as King of Elis. This localises our mythe, and shows, at least, that Elis is its birth place, and that, according to Greek custom, the reigning race of Elis derived its origin from Zeus. The same custom prevailed in India, and gave rise to the two great royal families of ancient India-the so-called Solar and the Lunar races; and Purûravas, of whom more by and by, says of himself,

There may, then, have been a King of Elis, Aethlios, and he may have had a son, Endymion; but what the mythe tells of Endymion could not have happened to the King of Elis. The mythe transfers Endymion into Karis, to Mount Latmos, because it was in the Latmian eseve that Selene saw the beautiful sleeper, loved him

and lost him. Now about the meaning of Selene, there can be no doubt; but even if tradition had only preserved her other name, Asterodia, we should have had to translate this synonyme, as Moon, as 'Wanderer among the stars.' But who is Endymion? It is one of the many names of the sun, but with special reference to the setting or dying sun. It is derived from tv-dów, a verb which, in classical Greek, is never used for setting, because the simple verb dúo had become the technical term for sunset. Δυσμαὶ ἡλίου, the setting of the Sun, is opposed to avaróλa, the rising. Now, dów meant, originally, to dive into; and expressions like hos dŭp' tov, the sun dived, presupposes an earlier conception of EdU TÓνTOV, he dived into the sea. Thus Thetis addresses her companions, Il. xviii. 140.

Ὑμεῖς μὲν νῦν δῦτε θαλάσσης εὐρέα κόλπον,

You may now dive into the broad bosom of the sea.

6

Other dialects, particularly of maritime nations, have the same expression. In Lat. we find Cur mergat seras æquore flammas.' In Old Norse, Sôl gengr i aegi.' Slavonic nations represent the sun as a woman stepping into her bath in the evening, and rising refreshed and purified in the morning; or they speak of the Sea as the mother of the Sun, and of the Sun as sinking into her mother's arms at night. We may suppose, therefore, that in some Greek dialect ivóów was used in the same sense; and that from ἐνδύω, ἐνδύμα was formed to express sunset. From this was formed ἐνδυμίων, like οὐρανίων from οὐρανός, and like most of the names of the Greek months. If ivdvua had become a common name for sunset, the mythe of Endymion could never have arisen. But the original meaning of Endymion being once forgotten, what was told

originally of the setting sun was now told of a name, which, in order to have any meaning, had to be changed into a god or a hero. The setting sun once slept in the Latmian cave, or cave of night,- Latmos being derived from the same root as Leto, Latona, the night; but now he sleeps on Mount Latmos, in Karia. Endymion, sinking into eternal sleep after a life of but one day, was once the setting sun, the son of Zeus — the brilliant Sky, and Kalyke the covering night (from каhúлт); or, according to another saying, of Zeus and Protogeneia, the first-born goddess, or the Dawn, who is always represented, either as the mother, the sister, or the forsaken wife of the Sun. Now he is the son of a King of Elis, probably for no other reason except that it was usual for kings to take names of good omen, connected with the sun, or the moon, or the stars, in which case a mythe, connected with a solar name, would naturally be transferred to its human namesake. In the ancient poetical and proverbial language of Elis, people said 'Selene loves and watches Endymion,' instead of ‘it is getting late;' 'Selene embraces Endymion,' instead of the sun is setting and the moon is rising;' 'Selene kisses Endymion into sleep,' instead of it is night.' These expressions remained long after their meaning had ceased to be understood; and as the human mind is generally as anxious for a reason as ready to invent one, a story arose by common consent, and without any personal effort, that Endymion must have been a young lad loved by a young lady, Selene; and if children were anxious to know still more, there would always be a grandmother happy to tell them that this young Endymion was the son

of the Protogeneia, she half meaning and half not meaning by that name the Dawn, who gave birth to the sun; or of Kalyke, the dark and covering night. This name, once touched, would set many chords vibrating; three or four different reasons might be given (as they really were given by ancient poets) why Endymion fell into this everlasting sleep, and if any of these was alluded to by a popular poet, it became a mythological fact, repeated by later poets; so that Endymion grew at last almost into a type, no longer of the setting sun, but of a handsome boy beloved of a chaste maiden, and therefore a most likely name for a young prince. Many mythes have thus been transferred to real persons, by a mere similarity of name, though it must be admitted that there is no historical evidence whatsoever that there ever was a Prince of Elis, called by the name of Endymion.

"Such is the growth of a legend, originally a mere word, a vos, probably one of those many words which have but a local currency, and lose their value if they are taken to distant places, words useless for the daily intercourse of thought, -spurious coins in the hands of the many, - yet not thrown away, but preserved as curiosities and ornaments, and deciphered at last, after many centuries, by the antiquarian."1

I give this specimen merely to explain and illustrate the modern theory. For the argument in support of it I must refer to the Essay itself; though even there it suffers much for want of room. But that the pro

cess described is possible and natural, may be shown

1 Oxford Essays, 1856, p. 49.

meanwhile without going out of our own literature or our own times.

The poetry of earth is never dead:

and even within the last ten years an instance has occurred of the simple language of poetic passion being translated out of poetry into mythology. Alfred Tennyson speaks in In Memoriam of returning home in the evening

Before the crimson-circled star

Had fallen into her father's grave:

not thinking at all of any traditional pedigree, (no more than when he speaks of

Sad Hesper, o'er the buried Sun,

And ready thou to die with him,)

but expressing, by such an image as the ancient Elian might have resorted to, his sympathy with the pathetic aspect of the dying day. Critics however asked for explanations: what star, whose daughter, what grave? And it turns out curiously enough that all these questions can be answered out of Greek mythology quite satisfactorily. "The planet Venus (says a Belgravian correspondent of Notes and Queries, 1851, iii. 506), when she is to the east of the sun, is our evening star (and as such used to be termed Hesperus by the ancients). The evening star in a summer twilight is seen surrounded with the glow of sunset, crimson-circled. . . . . Venus sinking into the sea, which in setting she would appear to do, falls into the grave of Uranus, — her father according to the theory of Hesiod (190). The part cast into the sea from wach Aphrodite sprung, is here taken by a becoming cence (which softens the grossness of the old tradi

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