took new
shapes in the legends of the victories of St Michael and St George; and
the kindly snakes of the "good goddess" lived on in the _immanissimus
draco_ whose baneful activity in a cave of the Capitol was cut short by
the intervention of the saintly pope Silvester I. (Duchesne, _Liber
pontificalis_, i. 109 seq.). In this respect indeed Christian mythology
found itself in harmony with that of the pagan North. The similarity of
the Northern and Oriental snake myths seems to point to some common
origin in an antiquity too remote to be explored. Whatever be the origin
of the Northern dragon, the myths, when they first become articulate for
us, show him to be in all essentials the same as that of the South and
East. He is a power of evil, guardian of hoards, the greedy withholder
of good things from men; and the slaying of a dragon is the crowning
achievement of heroes--of Siegmund, of Beowulf, of Sigurd, of Arthur, of
Tristram--even of Lancelot, the beau ideal of medieval chivalry. Nor
were these dragons anything but very real terrors, even in the
imaginations of the learned, until comparatively modern times. As the
waste places were cleared, indeed, they withdrew farther from the haunts
of men, and in Europe their last lurking-places were the inaccessible
heights of the Alps, where they lingered till Jacques Balmain set the
fashion which has finally relegated them to the realm of myth. In the
works of the older naturalists, even in the great _Historia animalium_
of so critical a spirit as Conrad Gesner (d. 1564), they still figure as
part of the fauna known to science.

[Illustration: Dragon Lizard (_Draco taeniopterus_).]

As to their form, this varied from the beginning. The Chaldaean dragon
Ti[=a]mat had four legs, a scaly body, and wings. The Egyptian Apophis
was a monstrous snake, as were also, originally at least, the Greek
_dracontes_. The dragon of the Apocalypse (Rev. xii. 3), "the old
serpent," is many-headed, like the Greek Hydra. The dragon slain by
Beowulf is a snake (worm), for it "buckles like a bow "; but that done
to death by Sigurd, though its motions are heavy and snake-like, has
legs, for he wounds it "behind the shoulder." On the other hand, the
dragon seen by King Arthur in his dreams is, according to Malory, winged
and active, for it "swoughs" down from the sky. The belief in dragons
and the conceptions of their shape were undoubtedly often determined, in
Europe as in China, by the discovery o