"Sometimes on lonely mountain meres
İ find a magic bark ;

I leap on board: no helmsman steers :
I float till all is dark.

A gentle sound, an awful light!

Three angels bear the holy Grail :
With folded feet, in stoles of white,
On sleeping wings they sail.
Ah, blessed vision! blood of God!
My spirit beats her mortal bars,
As down dark tides the glory slides,

And, star-like, mingles with the stars."

Whilst in such legends as the Arthurian group the grain of truth, if it exists, is so embedded as to be out of reach, there are others concerning actual personages, notably Cyrus and Charlemagne, not to quote other names from both "profane" and sacred history, in which the fable can be separated from the fact without difficulty. Enough is known of the life and times of such men to detach the certain from the doubtful, as, e.g., when Charlemagne is spoken of as a Frenchman and as a Crusader before there was a French nation, or the idea of Crusades had entered the heads of most Christian kings; and as in the legends of the infancy of Cyrus, which are of a type related to like legends of the wonderful round the early years of the famous.

This, however, by the way. Leaving illustration of the fabulous in heroic story, it will be interesting to trace it through such a tale of pathos and domestic life as the well-known one of Llewellyn and his faithful hound, Gellert.

Whose emotions have not been stirred by the story of Llewellyn the Great going out hunting, and missing his favourite dog; of his return, to be greeted by the creature with more than usual pleasure in his eye, but with jaws besmeared with blood; of the anxiety with which Llewellyn rushed into the house, to find the cradle where had lain his beautiful boy upset, and the ground around it soaked with blood; of his thereupon killing the dog, and then seeing the child lying unharmed beneath the cradle, and sleeping by the side of a dead wolf, from whose ravenous maw the faithful Gellert had delivered it? Most of us, in our visits to North Wales, have stood by Gellert's grave at Beddgelert, little suspecting that the affecting story occurs in the folk-lore of nearly every Aryan people, and of several non-Aryan races, as the Egyptians and Chinese.

Probably it comes to us as many other tales have come, through collections like the well-known Gesta Romanorum, compiled by mediæval monks for popular entertainment. In the version given in that book the knight who corresponds to Llewellyn, after slaying his dog, discovers that it had saved his child from a serpent, and thereupon breaks his sword and departs on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. But the monks were no inventors of such tales; they recorded those that came to them through the pilgrims, students, traders, and warriors who travelled from west to east and from east to west in the Middle Ages, and it is in the native home of fable and imagery the storied Orient, that we must seek for the

earliest forms of the Gellert legend. In the Panchatantra, the oldest and most celebrated Sanskrit fablebook, the story takes this form :-An infirm child is left by its mother while she goes to fetch water, and she charges the father, who is a Brahman, to watch over it. But he leaves the house to collect alms, and soon after this a snake crawls towards the child. In

the house was an ichneumon, a creature often cherished as a house pet, who sprang at the snake and throttled it. When the mother came back, the ichneumon went gladly to meet her, his jaws and face smeared with the snake's blood. The horrified mother, thinking it had killed her child, threw her water-jar at it, and killed it; then seeing the child safe beside the mangled body of the snake, she beat her breast and face with grief, and scolded her husband for leaving the house.

We find the same story, with the slight difference that the animal is an otter, in a later Sanskrit collection, the Hitopadesa, but we can track it to that fertile source of classic and mediæval fable, the Buddhist Jatakas, or Birth Stories, a very ancient collection of fables, which, professing to have been told by the Buddha, narrates his exploits in the 550 births through which he passed before attaining Buddhahood. In the Vinaya Pitaka of the Chinese Buddhist collection, which, according to Mr. Beal, dates from the fifth century A.D., and is translated from original scriptures supposed to have existed near the time of Asoka's council in the third century B.C., we have the earliest extant form of the

K

tale. That in the Panchatantra is obviously borrowed from it, the differences being in unimportant detail, as, for example, the nakula, or mongoose, is killed by the Brahman on his return home, the wife having neglected to take the child with her as bidden by him. He is filled with sorrow, and then a Deva continues the strain :—

"Let there be due thought and consideration,

Give not way to hasty impulse,

By forgetting the claims of true friendship

You may heedlessly injure a kind heart (person)
As the Brahman killed the nakula."

The several versions of the story which could be cited from German, Russian, Persian, and other Aryan folk-lore, would merely present certain variations due to local colouring and to the inventiveness of the narrators or transcribers; and, omitting these, it will suffice to give the Egyptian variant or corresponding form, in which the tragical has given place to the amusing, save, perhaps, in the opinion of the Wali. This luckless person once smashed a pot full of herbs which a cook had prepared. The exasperated cook thrashed the well-intentioned but unfortunate Wali within an inch of his life, and when he returned, exhausted with his efforts at belabouring the man, he discovered among the herbs a poisonous snake."

In pointing to the venerable Buddhist Birth Stories as the earliest extant source of Aryan fables, it should be added that these were with the Buddha and his disciples the favourite vehicle of carrying to

the hearts of men those lessons of gentleness and tenderness towards all living things which are a distinctive feature of that non-persecuting religion.

§ VIII.

MYTH AMONG THE HEBREWS.

With the important exception of reference to the change effected in the Jewish doctrine of spirits, and its resulting influence on Christian theology, by the transformation of the mythical Ahriman of the old Persian religion into the archfiend Satan, but slight allusion has been made in these pages to the myths and legends of the Semitic race. Under this term, borrowed from the current belief in their descent from Shem, are included extant and extinct people, the Assyrians, Chaldeans or Babylonians, Phoenicians, Arabs, Syrians, Jews, and Ethiopians.

The mythology of the Aryan nations has had the advantage of the most scholarly criticism, and the light which this has thrown upon the racial connection of peoples between whom all superficial likeness had long disappeared, as well as upon the early condition of their common ancestors, is of the greatest value as aid to our knowledge of the mode of man's intellectual and spiritual growth. And the comparisons made between the older and cruder forms underlying the elaborated myth and the myths of semi-barbarous races have supported conclusions