t was as if some one in our own
day were to convert the poems of Homer into an allegory of the Christian
religion, at the same time maintaining them to be an exact and veritable
history. In the Middle Ages the legend seems to have been half-forgotten
until revived by the discovery of America. It helped to form the Utopia
of Sir Thomas More and the New Atlantis of Bacon, although probably
neither of those great men were at all imposed upon by the fiction.
It was most prolific in the seventeenth or in the early part of
the eighteenth century, when the human mind, seeking for Utopias or
inventing them, was glad to escape out of the dulness of the present
into the romance of the past or some ideal of the future. The later
forms of such narratives contained features taken from the Edda, as well
as from the Old and New Testament; also from the tales of missionaries
and the experiences of travellers and of colonists.

The various opinions respecting the Island of Atlantis have no interest
for us except in so far as they illustrate the extravagances of which
men are capable. But this is a real interest and a serious lesson, if
we remember that now as formerly the human mind is liable to be imposed
upon by the illusions of the past, which are ever assuming some new
form.

When we have shaken off the rubbish of ages, there remain one or two
questions of which the investigation has a permanent value:--

1. Did Plato derive the legend of Atlantis from an Egyptian source? It
may be replied that there is no such legend in any writer previous to
Plato; neither in Homer, nor in Pindar, nor in Herodotus is there any
mention of an Island of Atlantis, nor any reference to it in Aristotle,
nor any citation of an earlier writer by a later one in which it is
to be found. Nor have any traces been discovered hitherto in Egyptian
monuments of a connexion between Greece and Egypt older than the eighth
or ninth century B.C. It is true that Proclus, writing in the fifth
century after Christ, tells us of stones and columns in Egypt on which
the history of the Island of Atlantis was engraved. The statement may be
false--there are similar tales about columns set up 'by the Canaanites
whom Joshua drove out' (Procop.); but even if true, it would only show
that the legend, 800 years after the time of Plato, had been transferred
to Egypt, and inscribed, not, like other forgeries, in books, but on
stone. Probably in the Alexandrian age, when Egypt had c