is very imaginative
and highly poetical nation beheld a divinity in every tree that grew, in
every stream that flowed, in the bright beams of the glorious sun, and the
clear, cold rays of the silvery moon; for them the whole universe lived and
breathed, peopled by a thousand forms of grace and beauty.

The most important of these divinities may have been something more than
the mere creations of an active and poetical imagination. They were
possibly human beings who had so distinguished themselves in life by their
preeminence over their fellow-mortals that after death they were deified by
the people among whom they lived, and the poets touched with their magic
wand the details of lives, which, in more prosaic times, would simply have
been recorded as illustrious. {10}

It is highly probable that the reputed actions of these deified beings were
commemorated by bards, who, travelling from one state to another,
celebrated their praise in song; it therefore becomes exceedingly
difficult, nay almost impossible, to separate bare facts from the
exaggerations which never fail to accompany oral traditions.

In order to exemplify this, let us suppose that Orpheus, the son of Apollo,
so renowned for his extraordinary musical powers, had existed at the
present day. We should no doubt have ranked him among the greatest of our
musicians, and honoured him as such; but the Greeks, with their vivid
imagination and poetic license, exaggerated his remarkable gifts, and
attributed to his music supernatural influence over animate and inanimate
nature. Thus we hear of wild beasts tamed, of mighty rivers arrested in
their course, and of mountains being moved by the sweet tones of his voice.
The theory here advanced may possibly prove useful in the future, in
suggesting to the reader the probable basis of many of the extraordinary
accounts we meet with in the study of classical mythology.

And now a few words will be necessary concerning the religious beliefs of
the Romans. When the Greeks first settled in Italy they found in the
country they colonized a mythology belonging to the Celtic inhabitants,
which, according to the Greek custom of paying reverence to all gods, known
or unknown, they readily adopted, selecting and appropriating those
divinities which had the greatest affinity to their own, and thus they
formed a religious belief which naturally bore the impress of its ancient
Greek source. As the primitive Celts, however, were a less