ns, and the items of matter of fact, _if any such there
be_, must for ever remain indissolubly amalgamated, as the poet
originally blended them, for the amusement or edification of his
auditors.... It was one of the agreeable dreams of the Grecian epic
that the man who travelled far enough northward beyond the Rhiphaean
Mountains would in time reach the delicious country and genial
climate of the virtuous Hyperboreans, the votaries and favourites of
Apollo, who dwelt in the extreme north, beyond the chilling blasts
of Boreas. Now, the hope that we may, by carrying our researches
up the stream of time, exhaust the limits of fiction, and land
ultimately upon some points of solid truth, appears to me no less
illusory than this northward journey in quest of the Hyperborean
elysium.' Grote's frankly sceptical attitude represents fairly
well the general opinion of the middle of last century. The myths
were beautiful, but their value was not in any sense historical;
it arose from the light which they cast upon the workings of the
active Greek mind, and the revelation which they gave of the innate
poetic faculty which created myths so far excelling those of any
other nation.

Within the last forty years all this has been changed. Opinions
like that so dogmatically expressed by our great historian are
no longer held by anyone who has followed the current of modern
investigations, and remain only as monuments of the danger of
dogmatizing on matters concerning which all preconceived ideas
may be upset by the results of a single season's spade-work on
some ancient site; and he would be a bold man who would venture
to-day to call 'illusory' the search for 'points of solid truth'
in the old legends, or to assert that 'the items of matter of fact,
if any such there be,' are inextricable from the mass of romantic
inventions in which they are embedded. The work, of course, is by
no means complete; very probably it is scarcely more than well
begun; but already the dark gulf of time that lay behind the Dorian
conquest is beginning to yield up the unquestionable evidences of
a great, and splendid, and almost incredibly ancient civilization,
which neither for its antiquity nor for its actual attainment has
any cause to shrink from comparison with the great historic
civilizations of Mesopotamia or the Nile Valley; and while the
process of disentangling the historic nucleus of the legends from
their merely mythical and romantic elements can