her naturally grew more and more attenuated. Thus, the mythical world was much less real to the Romans than it had been to the Greeks. It was more like a world of mental abstractions. Soon there was a “god”, or part of a god, for every object and every activity under the sun, and when the empire was founded, each emperor, as he died, automatically became a divinity. To-day the first two “divine” emperors, _Julius_ and _Augustus_, take their places beside _Juno_, the Queen of Heaven, in our monthly calendar. We may say, in fact, that by the time Christianity began to spread in the Roman Empire, Roman official religion had become divorced from feeling altogether, its dry bones remaining little more than a convenient system of nomenclature. Not that the new religion had no serious rivals; but the doctrines of Stoics and Epicureans, the Mystery Schools, and cults such as that of Mithras, had little historical connection with Roman mythology. Yet if Rome contributed no discoveries of value concerning the relations of human beings to the gods, it was perhaps for this very reason that she was able to concentrate more exclusively upon working out their relations with each other; and in so doing she created jurisprudence. But in the later days of the empire, when this attenuation of the imaginative and supernatural element in Roman mythology had already gone beyond its logical conclusion, when Rome had absorbed the myths of Greece and Egypt and sterilized them both, the soul of Europe was stirring afresh in the north. Contact between the Roman tongue and that of their subjects, the Celtic “Galli” in north Italy and beyond the Alps, had grown more and more intimate. Gradually there came into being a sort of hybrid Low Latin, the father of modern French and the other Romance languages, which in many cases expressed Celtic notions and feelings in Latin forms. So it was that new life came to be breathed into some of the dead abstractions of Roman mythology; but it was a very different life from the old one. Thus, the old Roman deity Sors (Chance) had long ago developed for the Romans into a purely abstract idea, referring to the drawing of lots. But up in the north, far away from the capital, the ‘sortiarius’ became a mysterious teller of fortunes by that means. As the years went on, the syllables softened and smoothed and shortened themselves, until they became the old French ‘sorcier’ from which ‘sorcerie’ was formed, and so our English _sorcery_. It is strange to think how far this word has travelled from its origin; and in the work of a modern poet we find it travelling even farther, changing from a process into a sort of mysterious realm: Heart-sick of his journey was the Wanderer; Foot-sore and sad was he; And a Witch who long had lurked by the wayside, Looked out of sorcery....