By illustration is meant translation, the transference with the minimum of alteration of an idea expressed in one art into the medium of another. Were it possible in a work of art to separate the idea expressed from the form in which it is expressed, such transference might be an eligible and even elegant pastime. But every one knows that such separation of idea and form is in art impossible. Translation of poetry from one language to another is precarious, a thing only to be attempted by a poet; translation from one art to another is a task so inherently barren that the Greek, till his decadence, left it, instinctively, unattempted. Against the poison of this “illustration” theory M. Pottier’s monograph is the best antidote, and all students of the Greek mind will be grateful to Miss Kahnweiler for making his monograph more easily accessible. M. Pottier focuses our attention on the personal artist, a man not intent on “illustrating” another man’s work, but on producing works of art of his own. Douris uses sometimes the same material as Homer or Arktinos, but he shapes it to his own decorative ends; he draws his inspiration naturally and necessarily rather from graphic than from literary tradition. * * * * * Beneath the “illustration” fallacy there lurks, as regards mythology, another and a subtler misconception. Until quite recent years mythology has been again to scholars and students alike, a thing of “mythological allusions,” a matter to be “looked up” with a view to the elucidation of obscure passages in _Pindar_ or dramatic choruses. Even nowadays mythology remains, to many a well-furnished scholar, a sort of by-product, an elegant outgrowth of the Greek mind, a thing merely “poetical,” by which he means having no touch with reality. Or, at best, if the scholar be himself a poet, he loves mythology without analysing it, he feels it as a dream that haunts, a thing that attends and allures him through the waste places of scholarship, more real and more abiding than any realism, a thing to him so intimate that he does not ask the _why_ of it. Thanks to the impact of another study, anthropology, we are awake now and look at mythology with other eyes. We know that mythology is not a last, lovely, literary flower, but a thing primitive, deep-seated, long antedating anything that can be called literature, not a separate “subject” at all, but rather a mode of thinking common at an early stage to all subjects. Mythology is not the outcome of an idle, vagrant fancy, but a necessary step in the evolution of human thought; a strenuous step taken by man towards knowledge, towards the fashioning and ordering of the world of mental conceptions. Mythology is the mother-earth out of which for the Greeks grow those stately, fruit-bearing trees, literature, art, history, philosophy. A Greek vase-painter does not “illustrate” mythology, he utters it in line and colour as the poet utters it in words and rhythm.