He had called the
people together on the field of Mars, "when," in the simple language
which Dr Arnold has appropriated to these legendary stories--"when all
on a sudden there arose a dreadful storm, and all was dark as night; and
the rain, and the thunder, and the lightning, were so terrible that all
the people fled from the field, and ran to their homes. At last the
storm was over, and they came back to the field of Mars, but Romulus was
nowhere to be found, for Mars, his father, had carried him up to heaven
in his chariot." Dionysius the Greek found, in this mysterious
disappearance, a proof of the assassination of Romulus by certain of his
nobles, who stabbed him and conveyed him away in the thunder-storm. And
our own Hooke thought himself equally sagacious, in his day, when he
adopted this interpretation. But what is it that we have here? Not
history certainly; and as little an intelligent view of the fable.

What Hooke did, in his day, occasionally, and in an empirical manner,
some German literati have attempted in a quite systematic, _a priori_
fashion. They first determine that the myth or legend has been composed
by a certain play of the imagination--as the representing the history of
a people, or a tribe, under the personal adventures of an imaginary
being; and then they hope to unravel this work of the fancy, and get
back again the raw material of plain truth. If they are partially
correct in describing this to have been _one_ course the imagination
pursued--which is all that can be admitted--still the attempt is utterly
hopeless to recover, in its first shape, what has been confessedly
disguised and distorted. The naturalists of Laputa were justified in
supposing that the light of the sun had much to do with the growth of
gerkins, but it does not follow that they would succeed in their project
of "extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers."

For the _briefest_ illustration we can call to mind of this
philosophical ingenuity, we will refer the reader to Michelet's preface
to his History of Rome. We see the absurdity none the worse for it being
presented through the transparent medium of the French writer. He thus
explains the discovery of the learned Germans whom he follows:--"Ce
qu'il y a de plus original, c'est d'avoir prouve que ces fictions
historiques etaient une necessite de notre nature. L'humanite d'abord
materielle et grossiere, ne pouvait dans les langues encore toutes
concretes, exprimer la pensee abs