early assembly, of which he names nine, instead of the fifteen recited in the _Regius Poem_. What shall we say of this Legend, with its recurring and insistent emphasis upon the antiquity of the order, and its linking of Egypt with Israel? For one thing, it explodes the fancy that the idea of the symbolical significance of the building of the Temple of Solomon originated with, or was suggested by, Bacon's _New Atlantis_. Here is a body of tradition uniting the Egyptian Mysteries with the Hebrew history of the Temple in a manner unmistakable. Wherefore such names as Hermes, Pythagoras, and Euclid, and how did they come into the old craft records if not through the Comacine artists and scholars? With the story of that great order before us, much that has hitherto been obscure becomes plain, and we recognize in these _Old Charges_ the inaccurate and perhaps faded tradition of a lofty symbolism, an authentic scholarship, and an actual history. As Leader Scott observes, after reciting the old legend in its crudest form: /#[4,66] _The significant point is that all these names and Masonic emblems point to something real which existed in some long-past time, and, as regards the organisation and nomenclature, we find the whole thing in its vital and actual working form in the Comacine Guild._[75] #/ Of interest here, as a kind of bridge between old legend and the early history of the order in England, and also as a different version of the legend itself, is another document dating far back. There was a MS discovered in the Bodleian Library at Oxford about 1696, supposed to have been written in the year 1436, which purports to be an examination of a Mason by King Henry VI, and is allowed by all to be genuine. Its title runs as follows: "_Certain questions with answers to the same concerning the mystery of masonry written by King Henry the Sixth and faithfully copied by me, John Laylande, antiquarian, by command of his highness_." Written in quaint old English, it would doubtless be unintelligible to all but antiquarians, but it reads after this fashion: /#[4,66] What mote it be?--It is the knowledge of nature, and the power of its various operations; particularly the skill of reckoning, of weights and measures, of constructing buildings and dwellings of all kinds, and the true manner of forming all things for the use of man. Where did it begin?--It began with the first men of the East, who were before the first men of the West, and coming with it, it hath brought all comforts to the wild and comfortless. Who brought it to the West?--The Phoenicians who, being great merchants, came first from the East into Phoenicia, for the convenience of commerce, both East and West by the Red and Mediterranean Seas.