its advocates,
the whole contemporary documents of the Victorian Dynasty have perished.
When an over-educated and over-rated populace, headed by two mythical
figures, Wat Tyler and one Jo, {285a} rose in fury against the School
Boards and the Department, they left nothing but tattered fragments of
the literature of the time. Consequently we are forced to reconstruct
the Gladstonian myth by the comparative method--that is, by comparing the
relics of old Ritual treatises, hymns, imprecations, and similar
religious texts, with works of art, altars, and statues, and with popular
traditions and folklore. The results, again, are examined in the light
of the Vedas, the Egyptian monuments, and generally of everything that,
to the unscientific eye, seems most turbidly obscure in itself, and most
hopelessly remote from the subject in hand. The aid of Philology will
not be rejected because Longus, or Longinus, has {285b} meanly argued
that her services must be accepted with cautious diffidence. On the
contrary, Philology is the only real key to the labyrinths of
post-Christian myth.

The philological analysis of the name of Gladstone is attempted, with
very various results, by Roth, Kuhn, Schwartz, and other contemporary
descendants of the old scholars. Roth finds in "Glad" the Scotch word
"gled," a hawk or falcon. He then adduces the examples of the
Hawk-Indra, from the Rig Veda, and of the Hawk-headed Osiris, both of
them indubitably personifications of the sun. On the other hand, Kuhn,
with Schwartz, fixes his attention on the suffix "stone," and quotes,
from a fragment attributed to Shakespeare, "the all-dreaded
thunder-stone." Schwartz and Kuhn conclude, in harmony with their
general system, that Gladstone is really and primarily the thunderbolt,
and secondarily the spirit of the tempest. They quote an isolated line
from an early lay about the "Pilot who weathered the storm," which they
apply to Gladstone in his human or political aspect, when the
storm-spirit had been anthropomorphised, and was regarded as an ancestral
politician. But such scanty folklore as we possess assures us that the
storm, on the other hand, weathered Gladstone; and that the poem quoted
refers to quite another person, also named William, and probably
identical with William Tell--that is, with the sun, which of course
brings us back to Roth's view of the hawk, or solar Gladstone, though
this argument in his own favour has been neglected by th