Rousseau is usually credited with the discovery that mountains are not intrinsically hideous. Long before his day, isolated men had loved the mountains, but these men were eccentrics. They founded no school; and Rousseau was certainly the first to popularise mountains and to transform the cult of hill worship into a fashionable creed. None the less, we must guard against the error of supposing that mountain love was confined to the few men who have left behind them literary evidence of their good taste. Mountains have changed very little since man became articulate, and the retina of the human eye has changed even less. The beauty of outline that stirs us to-day was implicit in the hills “that shed their burial sheets about the march of Hannibal.” It seems reasonable to suppose that a few men in every age have derived a certain pleasure, if not from Alpine travel at least from the distant view of the snows. The literature of the Ancient World contains little that bears upon our subject. The literature of the Jews is exceptional in this respect. This is the more to their credit, as the mountains of Judæa, south of the beautiful Lebanon range, are shapeless and uninteresting. Deuteronomy, the Psalms, Job, and Isaiah contain mountain passages of great beauty. The Old Testament is, however, far richer in mountain praise than the New Testament. Christ retired more than once to the mountains; but the authors of the four Gospels content themselves with recording the bare fact that certain spiritual crises took place on mountain-tops. There is not a single indication in all the gospels that Nazareth is set on a hill overlooking one of the fairest mountain prospects in all Judæa, not a single tribute to the beauty of Galilee girdled by the outlying hills of Hermon. The Greeks lived in a land of mountains far lovelier than Palestine’s characterless heights. But the Jews showed genuine if spasmodic appreciation for their native ranges, whereas the Greeks, if their literature does them justice, cared little or nothing for their mountains. The note of fear and dread, pleasantly rare in Jewish literature, is never long absent from Greek references to the mountains. Of course, the Greeks gave Olympus to their gods, but as Mr. Norman Young remarks in a very able essay on _The Mountains in Greek Poetry_, it was necessary that the gods should look down on mankind; and, as they could not be strung up in mid-air, the obvious thing was to put them on a mountain-top. Perhaps we may concede that the Greeks paid a delicate compliment to Parnassus, the Home of the Muses; and certainly they chose for their temples the high ground of their cities. As one wanders through the olives and asphodels, one feels that the Greeks chose for their dwellings and temples those rising grounds which afforded the noblest prospect of the neighbouring hills. Only the cynic would contend that they did this in order to escape the atmosphere of the marshes.