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It was his habit to treat every boy unmercifully who injured me. Very early, the Indian boy assumed the task of preserving and transmitting the legends of his ancestors and his race. Almost every evening a myth, or a true story of some deed done in the past, was narrated by one of the parents or grand-parents, while the boy listened with parted lips and glistening eyes.
"Why do you allow this woman to saddle you with her child when you KNOW you are not the father of it?" said a friend to him a few months before his death. "Sir," he replied, "when a lady does me the honor to name me the father of her child I trust I shall always be too gallant to show myself ungrateful for the favor." There are two curious legends relating to Aaron Burr.
When she died it was buried with her not in the tomb itself, but in the Taj Mehal; and for a century or so it lay there and gathered legends about it as thick as dust. It was believed to be a talisman of good fortune especially in love. "It had age; it had intrinsic value; it had beauty, and that one other quality no man can resist it was the only thing of its kind in the world.
Such are the legends surrounding the foundation of Mecca and of the Kaaba, of which, as of the legends concerning the early days of Rome, it may be said that they are chiefly interesting as throwing light upon the character of the race which produced them.
In the legends of the Theogonia, in that of Zeus and Cronus, for instance, there is evidently a metaphysical allegory; in the legends of Persephone, or of the Dioscuri, a physical one; in that of Athene, a profoundly philosophical one; and fused as the entire system was in the intensely poetical conception of the early thinkers, it would be impossible, even if it were desirable, at this time of day, to disentangle the fibres of all these various elements.
For this reason the priests of this religion prefer to write in the dialects used by the people, and indeed some of their principal works are written in Prakrit or in Pali. Among these are many legends, and chronicles, and books on theology and jurisprudence. The literary men of Buddhism are generally the priests, who receive different names in different countries.
On the other hand, if he has given free life to many beautiful legends that were undoubtedly current and believed for centuries, is it heresy to avow that these as such seem to me of more true value to the antiquary than if they had been subjected at their historical inception to the critical and theoretical methods of to-day?
The story has been examined and found to be improbable, but Charnock was a bold fellow who might easily have started many legends; and the poem remains, and if there is a livelier, I should like to know of it. I have been at the agreeable pains of reconstructing the verses as they were probably written, so that there are two more than the Nilghai sang.
So that when once you have learned how to spell these most precious of all legends, pictures and buildings, you may read the characters of men, and of nations, in their art, as in a mirror; nay, as in a microscope, and magnified a hundredfold; for the character becomes passionate in the art, and intensifies itself in all its noblest or meanest delights.
You can dip into Greek and Latin literature, history ancient and modern you can learn something of all mythologies-Pagan, Christian, and Hindoo; if your taste lies in the direction of Icelandic legends, you will not be disappointed in your sixpennyworth. For the last hundred years the painter seems to have neglected nothing except to learn how to paint.
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