Not so has Swinburne read the character. His Tristram of Lyonesse is once more the free, open-handed, light-hearted hero, or rather he would be if he had not inevitably contracted some of the _Zeit-Geist_, its weariness, its languor, its power of analysis. His gaiety is not spontaneous—his song is as labored as if he had had to send it up for an examination; his love is over-heavy with its own sweetness. The long-drawn, honied lines drag on and on through pages of description, till we almost long for a rough, dissonant note to break the eternal, soft, alliterative hissing and kissing. But Iseult bears the wealth of jewelled epithets lavished upon her, and it is easy enough to understand them when we are under the spell of her fascination, or when she is finely contrasted with the cruel, cold-blooded Iseult of Brittany, who in her jealous anger kills her husband, by telling him that the sails of the ship which is bringing his love to him are black instead of white, so that he thinks she has refused to come: And fain he would have raised himself and seen And spoken, but strong death struck sheer between, And darkness closed as iron round his head, And smitten through the heart lay Tristan dead. So there he lies. But he may yet be born again, and fight, and love, and die, for who knows what shall be in the days to come, or to what ancient songs the houses of our children’s children may echo? It may be there is yet a further interpretation of the riddle, the outlines of which we cannot even guess; and that the two Iseults may come to like each other. Things even more strange than this have happened. It was said that out of Tristram’s grave there grew an eglantine, which turned itself around Iseult’s; and although it was cut three times by order of the king, the eglantine was ever fair and fresh. By this time it has grown into a mighty tree, and, for all we know, it has not done growing yet.—_Merry England._ OLD MYTHOLOGY IN NEW APPAREL. BY J. THEODORE BENT. We are generally accustomed to consider mythology as a bygone episode of _juventus mundi_; it may seem at first sight strange to realize that what we have read of in Homer exists to-day. But so it is, and the following facts collected during lengthened tours in remote corners of Greece will prove, I hope, that the mystic beings of classical Greece are present now, when the world is supposed to be growing old. All my instances are from the islands of the Ægean Sea, the Cyclades and the Sporades, where communication with the outer world has never been great, and over which the various waves of Goths, Italians, Turks, which in a measure destroyed the identity of continental Greece, had, comparatively speaking, slight influence, and that only in the towns near the coast, whereas up in the mountains of Naxos, Amorgos, &c., pure Greek blood still flows.