in every case, and when we have enjoyed it and felt
something of the exquisiteness of the conception and of the variety and
range of thought exhibited in the fertile minds of those who had first
told it, Sir George Cox draws us back sharply to the assertion that all
we have been hearing really meant another phase of sunset or sunrise,
until we absolutely rebel and protest that the effect is unaccountable
upon so meagre a cause. It is an easy method of dealing with folk-lore.
If you take the rhyme of Mary and her little lamb, and call Mary the sun
and the lamb the moon, you will achieve astonishing results, both in
religion and astronomy, when you find that the lamb followed Mary to
school one day. This nature element, however, had undoubtedly a very
considerable part in the origin of myths, and when Max Mueller combines
it with philology it opens a vast field of extraordinarily interesting
interpretations resting upon words and their changes.

A further theory of myths is that which regards them as the stories of
races told as if they had been the lives of individuals. This, as is
well known, has had permanent effects upon the interpretation not only
of Greek but of Hebrew ancient writings, and it throws light upon some
of those chapters of Genesis which, without it, are but strings of
forgotten and unpronounceable names.

But beyond all such explanations, after we have allowed for them in
every possible way, there remains a conviction that behind these
fascinating stories there is a certain irreducible remainder of actual
fact. Individual historic figures, seen through the mists of time, walk
before our eyes in the dawn. Long before history was written men lived
and did striking deeds. Heroic memories and traditions of such
distinguished men passed in the form of fireside tales from one
generation to another through many centuries. Now they come to us,
doubtless hugely exaggerated and so far away from their originals as to
be unrecognisable, and yet, after all, based upon things that happened.
For the stories have living touches in them which put blood into the
glorious and ghostly figures, and when we come upon a piece of genuine
human nature there is no possibility of mistaking it. This thing has
been born, not manufactured: nor has any portrait that is lifelike been
drawn without some model. Thus, through all the mist and haze of the
past, we see men and women walking in the twilight--dim and uncertain
forms indeed