Kleine Mythen) tower up in cleft magnificence above the cradle of Swiss freedom. As to the story of William Tell, this, alas! has gone the way of our own tales of Robin Hood (whom Mr. Sydney Lee dismisses as a "mythical forest elf") and his Merry Men of Sherwood Forest. The legend first appears in the manuscript "Weisses Buch," so-called from its white binding, that is still preserved at Sarnen, and which was written between 1467 and 1476; and in the poem called the "Tellenlied," which dates from about 1474. Tell, however, is supposed to have lived at about the commencement of the fourteenth century. There are certainly some scraps of evidence that suggest in combination that the later Tell myth (as, for that matter, are presumably most myths) is based on some substratum of solid historical fact. Thus, there is said to be evidence that a religious observance of some kind was instituted in connection with Tell in the place where he lived in 1387; and it is stated, though not earlier than 1504, that a chapel was erected on the Tellsplatte, as the country people believed in commemoration of the landing there of William Tell, in 1388. The story as now commonly reported--that Tell refused to do obeisance to the Austrian Arch-duke's cap at Altdorf; that he shot the apple off his son's head at the brutal bidding of Gesler in the market-place of the same town; that he afterwards escaped from Austrian custody by springing from the boat to the shore at the Tellsplatte during the onset of a sudden squall; and that he shot the tyrant through the heart as the latter neared his castle hall at Küssnacht--first assumed its present form, in which it has been dramatized by Schiller, at the hands of Tschudi of Glarus, in the first half of the sixteenth century. Even as early, however, as the close of this same century the very existence of William Tell had been questioned by Guilmann in his _De Rebus Helveticis_. Voltaire was duly sceptical as to the story of the boy and the apple ("l'histoire de la pomme est bien suspecte"); but the patriotic faith of Canton Uri was still sufficiently strong at the close of the eighteenth century to consign to the flames at the hand of the public hangman the sceptical "Guillaume Tell; fable danoise." The result, however, as expressed curtly in Murray's handbook, is that Tell has been banished from authentic history. Exactly similar legends or sagas of the tenth century are found in Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Holstein, and on the Rhine; and our Clym of the Clough shoots at an apple on his son's head-- "But Cloudesle cleft the apple in two, His son he did not nee'."