ng traditionally ascribed to him many base actions, they
involuntarily made amends to reason by tying up the hands of so bad a
god. He is made as helpless as a king of England. Prometheus knows one
secret which Jove must bargain for; Minerva, another. He cannot get his
own thunders; Minerva keeps the key of them:--

"Of all the gods, I only know the keys
That ope the solid doors within whose vaults
His thunders sleep."

A plain confession of the in-working of the All and of its moral
aim. The Indian mythology ends in the same ethics; and it would seem
impossible for any fable to be invented and get any currency which was
not moral. Aurora forgot to ask youth for her lover, and though Tithonus
is immortal, he is old. Achilles is not quite invulnerable; the sacred
waters did not wash the heel by which Thetis held him. Siegfried, in the
Nibelungen, is not quite immortal, for a leaf fell on his back whilst
he was bathing in the dragon's blood, and that spot which it covered is
mortal. And so it must be. There is a crack in every thing God has made.
It would seem there is always this vindictive circumstance stealing in
at unawares even into the wild poesy in which the human fancy attempted
to make bold holiday and to shake itself free of the old laws,--this
back-stroke, this kick of the gun, certifying that the law is fatal;
that in nature nothing can be given, all things are sold.

This is that ancient doctrine of Nemesis, who keeps watch in the
universe and lets no offence go unchastised. The Furies they said are
attendants on justice, and if the sun in heaven should transgress his
path they would punish him. The poets related that stone walls and iron
swords and leathern thongs had an occult sympathy with the wrongs of
their owners; that the belt which Ajax gave Hector dragged the Trojan
hero over the field at the wheels of the car of Achilles, and the sword
which Hector gave Ajax was that on whose point Ajax fell. They recorded
that when the Thasians erected a statue to Theagenes, a victor in the
games, one of his rivals went to it by night and endeavored to throw it
down by repeated blows, until at last he moved it from its pedestal and
was crushed to death beneath its fall.

This voice of fable has in it somewhat divine. It came from thought
above the will of the writer. That is the best part of each writer
which has nothing private in it; that which he does not know; that which
flowed out of his c