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Updated: May 18, 2025
For a symbolical religion, created by the priests of one age, is reinstated or remodelled after its corruption by the philosophers of another. XII. We may here pause a moment to inquire whence the Greeks derived the most lovely and fascinating of their mythological creations those lesser and more terrestrial beings the spirits of the mountain, the waters, and the grove.
To deny praise to a performance which so many thousands have laboured to imitate, would be to judge with too little deference for the opinion of mankind: yet whoever shall read it with impartiality, will find that most of the images are of the mythological kind, and therefore easily invented; and that there are few sentiments of rational praise or natural lamentation.
In allusion to her love of flowers this quatrain was composed: "Josephiniana! this is the new flower Whose beauty catches my eye. To join the laurels of Caesar Nothing less is needed than an immortal flower." The Emperor was sung, too, in mythological language, for his flatterers tried to exhaust all sorts of adulation.
It is impossible, I think, to read this, and to an even greater degree some of the other stories, which have been translated by Mr. Joyce and others, without perceiving how thoroughly impregnated with old-world and mythological sentiment they are. An air of all but fabulous antiquity pervades them, greater perhaps than pervades the legends of any other north European people.
'Nothing was more characteristic of Rubens than his choice of subjects from the mythology of the Greeks and the works of the ancient poets; and in nothing did he display more freedom, originality, and poetry. Among his most famous mythological pictures is the 'Battle of the Amazons, now at Munich.
It is in death, ultimately, that the whole meaning of sin comes home to the sinner; he has not sounded it to its depths till he has discovered that this comes into it at last. And we must not suppose that when Paul read the third chapter of Genesis he read it as a mythological explanation of the origin of physical death, and accepted it as such on the authority of inspiration.
This over-readiness to seize hints is an inevitable part of that secret hero-worship which is the heart of biography. The lover of great men sees signs of them long before they begin to appear on the earth, and, like some old mythological chronicler, claims as their heralds the storms and the falling stars.
The later phases of Buddhism, described as Mahâyâna, show this feature among many others, that the supernatural and mythological side of religion becomes prominent. Gods or angels play an increasingly important part, the Buddha himself becomes a being superior to all gods, and Buddhas, gods and saints perform at every turn feats for which miracle seems too modest a name.
The ideal and the spiritual find little favor with this practical people, which, not content with symbols, must have gods of wood and stone whereto to pray, and which in its complicated mythological system, its priestly hierarchy, its gorgeous ceremonial, and finally in its lascivious ceremonies, is a counterpart to that Egypt, from which the Jew was privileged to make his escape.
There is likewise a statue of Beckford, a famous Lord Mayor, the most famous except Whittington, and that one who killed Wat Tyler; and like those two, his fame is perhaps somewhat mythological, though he lived and bustled within less than a century.
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