we find illustrated the theory which explains mythology by the analogy of poetry. That the mediæval myths which have been mentioned never attained the importance of Greek mythology is immediately accounted for by the fact that they sprang up, as it were, under the shadow of philosophy, religion, and history. They belonged to the popular consciousness; and this popular consciousness had no need or opportunity of converting its creatures into a body of beliefs, because both science and orthodoxy existed. In the historic period mythology must always occupy this subordinate position; and, perhaps, this fact might be reflected back as a further argument, if such were needed, against the theories that the Greek myths, while leading onward to the Greek Pantheon and Greek art, originated as an undergrowth beneath the decaying fabric of revealed truth or firmly apprehended philosophical ideas. At all events, both the positive and negative circumstances which we observe in them confirm the general view of mythology that has been advanced. The Homeric and Hesiodic poems were interposed between the reflective consciousness of the Greeks in the historic age and the mass of myths already existent in Hellas at the time of their composition, and thus mythology passed into the more advanced stage of art. It did not, however, cease on that account to retain some portion of its original plasticity and fluidity. It is clear from Pindar and the fragments of the minor lyric poets, from the works of the dramatists, from Plato, and from other sources, that what Herodotus reports about Homer and Hesiod having fixed the genealogies of the gods cannot be taken too literally. Non-Homeric and non-Hesiodic versions of the same tales were current in various parts of Greece. The same deities in different places received different attributes and different forms of worship; and the same legends were localized in widely separated spots. Each division of the Hellenic family selected its own patron deities, expressing in their cult and ritual the specific characteristics which distinguished Dorian, Æolian, and Ionian Hellas. At the same time certain headquarters of worship, like the shrine of Delphi and the temple of Olympian Zeus, were strictly Panhellenic. In this way it is clear that while Greek mythology acquired the consistence of a natural religion, it retained its free poetic character in a great measure. The nation never regarded their myths as a body of fixed dogma, to alter which was impious. Great liberty, consequently, was secured for artists; and it may be said with truth that the Greeks arrived through sculpture at a consciousness of their gods. A new statue was, in a certain sense, a new deity, although the whole aim of the sculptor must, undoubtedly, have been to render visible the thoughts contained in myths and purified by poetry, and so to pass onward step-wise to a fuller and fuller realization of the spiritual type. It is this unity,