fathers told us to look for it! And why should we not
find the flying serpent too? The interior of Africa is as yet an
unknown world of wonders; and we may yet discover there, for aught we
know, the descendants of the very satyr who chatted with St. Anthony.

No doubt the discovery of huge fossil animals, as Mrs. Jameson says,
on the high authority of Professor Owen, may have modified our
ancestors' notions of dragons: but in the old serpent worship we
believe the real explanation of these stories is to be found. There
is no doubt that human victims, and even young maidens, were offered
to these snake-gods; even the sunny mythology of Greece retains
horrible traces of such customs, which lingered in Arcadia, the
mountain fastness of the old and conquered race. Similar cruelties
existed among the Mexicans; and there are but too many traces of it
throughout the history of heathendom.

The same superstition may, as the legends assert, have lingered on,
or been at least revived during the later ages of the empire, in
remote provinces, left in their primeval barbarism, at the same time
that they were brutalised by the fiendish exhibitions of the Circus,
which the Roman governors found it their interest to introduce
everywhere. Thus the serpent became naturally regarded as the
manifestation of the evil spirit by Christians as well as by the old
Hebrews; thus, also, it became the presiding genius of the malaria
and fever which arose from the fens haunted by it--a superstition
which gave rise to the theory that the tales of Hercules and the
Hydra, Apollo and the mud-Python, St. George and the Dragon, were
sanitary-reform allegories, and the monsters whose poisonous breath
destroyed cattle and young maidens only typhus and consumption. We
see no reason why early Christian heroes should not have actually met
with such snake-gods, and felt themselves bound, like Southey's
Madoc, or Daniel in the old rabbinical story, whose truth has never
been disproved, to destroy the monsters at all risk. We see no
reason, either, why their righteous daring may not have been crowned
with victory; and suspect that on such events were gradually built up
the dragon-slaying legends which charmed all Europe, and grew in
extravagances and absurdities, till they began to degenerate into the
bombast of the "Seven Champions," and expired in the immortal ballad
of the "Dragon of Wantley," in which More of More Hall, on the
morning of his battle