bring anything of the kind into connexion with the priest of Aricia. Mr. Frazer's object seems to be to explain the admixture of grief and joy in certain rites, such as the 'carrying out of Death' and the expulsion of Mamurius Veturius or 'old Mars.' But it is not hard to find an explanation without supposing that the joy is over the carrying away of sins. It is probable that both originated when the year was made to begin with spring, as at Rome with March; and whether we explain the ceremonies as symbolizing the death of the old year and birth of the new, or as the death of vegetation in winter and its rising again in spring, the result is much the same. There is regret for what after all brought its blessings, and there is joy for the new birth with a promise of a rich harvest or a happy year. The bells tolling out the old year and ringing in the new express much the same mixture of feeling, and so does the poet's 'His face is growing sharp and thin, Alack! our friend is gone. Close up his eyes tie up his chin, Step from the corpse, and let him in, That standeth there alone. There's a new foot on the floor, my friend, A new face at the door.' 6 In Lord Tennyson it is an allegory, but in most primitive times the death was no doubt a ghastly reality of sacrifice; somewhat later a sacrifice by pantomime; for that the skinclad man who represented old Mars,' and was scourged out of the city with rods, was beaten, as Mr. Frazer thinks, to dispel any malignant influences by which at the supreme moment he (the victim) might conceivably be beset,' we cannot believe. The scourging with which he, as the representative of the old year, or of winter with its dead vegetation, was driven forth, was a substitute probably for the more ancient sacrifice, just as it is probable that the scourging of Spartan boys at the Altar of Artemis was a relic of human sacrifice. Before concluding this article we must notice some principles very important to students of primitive religions and mythology which are not indeed originated in this book, but are supported and enforced by a great deal of fresh evidence. There has been much controversy, whether, as a rule, curious customs and myths should be approached as if they were the perversion of something more rational by a degenerate people, or the shreds and remnants of a savage superstition retained by civilized descendants. It is hardly too much to say that all the customs and myths mentioned in these volumes can best be understood-and many are in no other way intelligible—if we believe believe that, as Mr. Andrew Lang expresses it, 'the modern folk-lore is the savage ritual;' and they thus tend to establish the general truth of the axiom long ago laid down, by Sir John Lubbock among others, that 'existing savages are not the descendants of civilized ancestors.' It is therefore a right principle to seek, in the living customs and religions of uncivilized races, a clue to the meaning of the superstitions and myths derived from a remote age, without caring too much whether the uncivilized race is of Aryan descent or not. similarity of ideas and objects in people at the same level of civilization, or savagery, will, as has been seen, produce similar rites, and the myths by which an attempt is made to explain these rites will have a family likeness. The With this is intimately connected another important axiom, that (in Mr. Frazer's words) 'ritual may be the parent of myths, but can never be its child.' In other words, we should almost invariably assume, that the story which explains an ancient custom has been invented to account for it, rather than that the custom was instituted because of the event related in the story. We say almost, because the theory might easily be ridden to death, like other theories. For instance, Mr. Frazer, following Mannhardt and others, has shown by numerous instances that burning by effigy is a sun-charm; it is even possible that there would have been no such thing as burning in effigy, had not these old magic fire-sacrifices given the first idea. Yet, if some comparative mythologist of the future asserts that Guy Fawkes was a mythical personage invented to explain some ancient sun-charm practised in November, he will have pushed an excellent rule too far. Still, soberly used, it will generally lead in the right direction. Mr. Frazer has pointed out that the Balder-myth may be regarded as an example of a story invented to account for a custom, and he gives many others in the course of his book. A curious instance, which he does not mention, may be found in the two myths regarding the hunting of the wren. The royalty attributed to this bird (perhaps derived from the crown of the so-called 'golden crested wren') is shown in different countries, as Mr. Frazer remarks, by the names Baoiliokos, regulus, roitelet, &c.; the hunting of the wren, his death, and the procession with his body, which are left unexplained, may perhaps be the relics of a superstition that he represented, as their sovereign, the race of birds: for such may be the point of the third line in The wren, the wren, the king of the birds, and and of a belief that his sacrifice would be the most effectual weather-charm; not as though he were a corn-spirit, which seems an unlikely idea, but because the birds, as denizens of the sky, were very commonly supposed to have a great deal to do with the regulation of the weather. But, whether we are right or wrong in this interpretation, the explanatory myths afford an excellent example of the axiom which we have quoted. It is natural that the old idea of sacrificing a being more or less divine, whose assistance was desired, should be misunderstood by later generations, and that some grudge against the slain on the part of the slayers should be imagined. Hence the older English myths, that the wren was slain because the song of a wren awoke a Danish army which the English would otherwise have destroyed; and the more modern Irish version, that a wren by beating with his feet on a drum saved some troops of William III. from being surprised by James II. It is clear that the latter is an instance of modern characters being fitted for local reasons into an old story; it is possible that the Danes may also replace some older combatants; but this at any rate is certain, that the oldest form of the story was merely an attempt to explain a still older custom. We may mention yet one more of the principles which the evidence in The Golden Bough' helps to establish. There has been a tendency in one school of mythologists to assume that if two myths or two legendary narratives have points of resemblance they must either be borrowed from a common source older than both of them, or one must be a plagiarism from the other. It is not sufficiently recognized that the same features may recur, not because one is a version of the other, but quite independently, because both are suggested by a custom more or less prevalent in a certain state of society; or again, in popular traditions of events, possible yet not matters of certain history, the same action may be ascribed to two heroes of different nations and epochs, not because the later hero is a garbled version of the earlier, and therefore a fiction, but from one of two causes. Either history repeated itself and the action really took place twice over; or it was the sort of feat which people of the time, when the story took its present shape, would deem creditable to their hero, and they clothe him with these borrowed garments, just as in these later days people set down to Sydney Smith many witty sayings which he never uttered. Sir George Cox, for instance, says that the story of William Tell received its death-blow as much from the hands of historians as from those of the comparative mythologists.' *Mythology of Aryan Nations,' ii. 96. The The story has (we say it with regret) apparently received its death-blow, and it is asserted that even the schools of its native canton disown it: but the fatal wound did not come from comparative mythology. The test of shooting an apple or anything else off the head of a son is an idea likely to occur to many persons; it might even happen two or three times; it certainly might be ascribed to their several heroes by two or three different nations who prized archery. The existence of Tell and Gessler must be disproved (as it seems to have been) by historical evidence. If history had not shown the main facts to be the invention of a later time, the incident of the apple, recurrent as it is, would not destroy our faith in Tell. At least let us bury him in peace without calling him 'the last reflexion of the sungod.' Apollo may have shot arrows, but yet national feeling may invent a heroic archer and call him Tell (or Ulysses) without a single thought of the arrows of the sun. Many instances of what may be called recurrent myths may be gathered from The Golden Bough:' the story of 'Danae' an example (ii. 237), which reappears in much the same form in Siberia and elsewhere, and is derived with some probability by Mr. Frazer from certain customs regarding the seclusion of girls at puberty from the sight of the sun-customs which seem to exist in all four quarters of the globe and in Australia to boot. We find the story of Meleager's brand in Iceland, not because one story was borrowed from the other or both from a common source, but probably because each is suggested independently by a widely-spread superstition about magic talismans and amulets. When once the truths are grasped, that myths were generally devised to explain customs and ritual, and that races with the same primitive and irrational minds are likely to arrive at somewhat similar customs and ritual, these recurrent myths need not always † be a difficulty, even though one version is found in an Aryan race, and the other in the middle of Africa or among Pacific islanders. *Chips from a German Workshop,' ii. 223. † It must be admitted that many puzzles of this kind still lack an explanation, as Mr. Lang has shown in chapter 18 of Myth, Ritual, and Religion.' ART. ART. IX.-1. Report of the Conference of Head Masters held at Oxford on December 23rd, 1890. 2. Correspondence thereon, especially in the Times' newspaper, December 1890 and January 1891. 3. The University Calendars of Oxford, Cambridge, Dublin, London, the Royal University in Ireland. 4. The Indian Civil Service List; with various other Lists and Appendices. By A. C. Tupp, B.A. Madras, 1880. THE 'Zeitgeist' is walking again. That viewless and blind Imp, which loves the title of the Spirit of the Age, has begun to feel that it has been bottled too long. It has now assumed a form in which it menaces one of the greatest and most distinctive of England's Institutions-the method of teaching pursued hitherto in her great Public Schools and her historic Universities. Let us not for a moment shut our eyes to the importance of the issues at stake, or to the alarming imminence of a Revolution. Since the Conference of the Head Masters of the Public Schools, held at Oxford on the 23rd of last December, has rejected only by a majority of two (thirty-one noes against twenty-nine ayes) the resolution of the Head Master of Harrow'That in the opinion of this Conference it would be a gain to education if Greek were not a compulsory subject in the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge,'-it needs no prophet to foretell that the innovators will succeed in carrying their point, unless the English public is fully awakened to an apprehension of the magnitude of the revolution attempted, and the seriousness of the consequences which would flow from its success. If the resolution was so barely defeated in a body of men presumably not revolutionary by temperament, all of them Greek scholars, and some of them Greek scholars of the highest eminence, what chance would the maintenance of the study of Greek have with those who possess no classical training, those who welcome change for its own sake, or those who are under the influence of the Idola that the proper study for lads is the world we live in' (viewed solely, be it observed, from its purely material side), and that the real end of education is breadwinning'? We do not propose now to discuss the fitting objects of study, the right ends of education, or the origin and the appropriate functions of a University. These topics have been treated fully in a former article in this 'Review,' on the occasion when the Senate of Cambridge rejected a proposal similar to that which is now put forward. We fancy that this is not * April, 1873, No. 268, pp. 457–486. Vol. 172.-No. 343. P the |