Sometimes a venerable myth disappears for an exceptionally long period, and its vitality is, we suppose, extinguished. But though ages roll by, if it have in it the real essential power of development and assimilation, it is only waiting for its time to start a fresh career, full of concentrated vigour. Like the ear of wheat in the hand of the mummy, it has lain by, wrapped in cere-cloths, without giving token of germ, till the moment of its liberation has arrived, when, falling on good ground, it brings forth a hundredfold. Such was the history of Fouque’s exquisite romance, _Undine_. It was a very ancient tale, but it had been forgotten. The German poet found it in the dead hand of the whimsical pedant, Theophrastus Paracelsus, swathed in barbarous Latin. He writes:--“I ceased not to study an old edition of my speechmonger, which fell to me at an auction, and that carefully. Even his receipts I read through in order, just as they had been showered into the text, still continuing in the firm expectation that from every line something wonderfully magical might float up to me, and strike the understanding. Single sparks, here and there darting up, confirmed my hopes, and drew me deeper into the mines beneath ... then, at last, as a pearl of soft radiance, there sparkled towards me, from out its rough-edged shell--_Undine_.” And he tells us how that his story has been translated into French, Italian, English, Russian, and Polish. The mummy wheat was soon multiplied. The legend of King Robert of Sicily, which the American poet has rescued from oblivion, is one of those few which can be traced with rare precision through its various changes, and tracked to the country where it originated. It is instructive to note how in one form, it did service in the cause of one religion, and how, in another form, it pointed a striking moral in behalf of an entirely different creed. Two methods of procedure lie open to us in the examination of this story, analysis and synthesis. We might trace the legend back from the form in which it is known to the modern public, by sure stages, to the ultimate atoms out of which it is developed, or we might take the original germ, and follow it in its expanding and varying forms, till it has assumed its present shape in the pages of the _Tales of a Wayside Inn_. We shall adopt the latter method, as the most suitable in this peculiar instance. In the _Pantschatantra_, a Sanscrit collection of popular tales, the date of the compilation of which is uncertain, but that of the tales is unquestionably earlier than the Christian era, is the following story: