illustration of the controlling power of such sentiments, the profound and fervent reverence for the memory of Washington so sways the popular historical conception of the war of independence, as to identify it almost wholly with his character and services-making him the ONE great champion of the cause. While it is known that much was achieved by the wisdom and fortitude of others, and that there was much that Washington had no part in, who for one moment could desire to disparage, or even critically to measure, that large and uncalculating homage, the justice of which is best proved by the depth and fervour of it? And it is the highest evidence of the reality of his fame, that all nicer estimates are mastered by this judgment of the heart, which makes the history of the Revolution centre around him.

It has been ingeniously and truly said-"We all write legends. Who has not observed in himself, in his ordinary dealings with the facts of everyday life, with the sayings and doings of his acquaintances, in short, with every thing which comes before him as a fact, a disposition to forget the real order in which they appear, and to rearrange them according to his theory of how they ought to be? Do we hear of a generous, self-denying action,In a short time the real doer and it are forgotten; it has become the property of the noblest person we know. So a jest we relate of the wittiest person; frivolity of the most frivolous; and so on. Each particular act we attribute to the person we conceive most likely to have been the author of it. And this does not arise from any wish to leave a false impression, scarcely from carelessness; but only because facts refuse to remain bare and isolated in our memory: they will arrange themselves under some

law or other; they must illustrate something to us—some character, some principle-or else we forget them. Facts are thus perpetually, so to say, becoming unfixed and rearranged in a more conceptional order. In this way we find fragments of Jewish history in the legends of Greece; stories from Herodotus become naturalized in the tradition of early Rome; and the mythic exploits of the Northern heroes, adopted by the biographers of Saxon kings. So with the great objects of national interest. Alfred, 'England's darling,' the noblest of the Saxon kings, became mythic almost before his death; and, forthwith, every institution that Englishmen most value, of law or church, became appropriated to him. He divided England into shiresHe established trial by jury-He destroyed wolves—and made the country so secure, that golden bracelets hung untouched in the open road. And when Oxford was founded, a century was added to, its age, and it was discovered that Alfred had laid the first stone of the first college." Again, it is said, "Time, in another way, plays strange tricks with facts, and is ever altering, shifting, and even changing their nature in our memory. Every man's past life is becoming mythic to him; we cannot call up again the feelings of our childhood; only we know that what then seemed to us the bitterest misfortunes, we have since learnt by change of character or circumstance to think very great blessings; and even when there is no change, and were they to recur again, they are such as we should equally repine at; yet, by mere lapse of time, sorrow is turned to pleasure, and the sharpest pang at present becomes the most alluring object of our retrospect. The sick bed, the school trial, loss of friends, pain and grief of every kind, become rounded off

and assume a soft and beautiful grace. The harshest facts are smoothed and chastened off in the past like the rough mountains and jagged rocks in the distant horizon. And so it is with every other event of our lives; read a letter we wrote ten years ago, and how impossible we find it to recognise the writer in our altered selves. Incident after incident rises up and bides its day, and then sinks back into the landscape. It changes by distance, and we change by age. While it was present it meant one thing, now it means another; and to-morrow, perhaps, something else on the point of vision alters. Even old Nature, endlessly and patiently reproducing the samę forms, the same beauties, cannot reproduce in us the same emotions we remember in our childhood. Then, all was Fairy-land; now, time and custom have deadened our sense, and

'The things which we have seen we now can see no more.'

This is the true reason why men people past ages with the superhuman and the marvellous. They feel their own past was, indeed, something miraculous, and they cannot adequately represent their feelings except by borrowing from another order of beings."*

This is also to be considered-that, doubtless, many an early narrative was composed, not with claim to literal belief, but as legends in the true sense of the term-productions intended to be read for example and instruction, given to simple, uncriticising folk, as moral apologues are to children. We judge them, therefore, perhaps by a wrong standard, and look on them with contempt because

* Lives of the English Saints, No. iv. pp. 75–78.

we lose sight of their moral purpose. Early history abounds with prodigies and portents, miraculous agencies and supernatural interpositions, stories that are sometimes impressive and often grotesque. Such things are acceptable to a certain condition of the human mind, and while they prevail there may be a great deal of stupid and superstitious credulity along with innocent docility of belief. Later ages grow beyond all this, but that growth is not necessarily all gain; for if irrational credulity be avoided, there is an opposite extreme-skepticism-infidelity atheism. Now, wild and extravagant and absurd as were the stories of the olden time, they did lead men to the belief that there is another world beyond that which we see; that there are realities beyond the things which we can handle; and, still more, that there is a providential government of the world, and that, as the earth rolls on through the silent spaces of the firmament, God's hand is upon it, and that his eye is on the soul of each creature of the countless generations of men that rise up and sink into their graves. In the olden time men were, no doubt, very superstitious-very credulousthey believed a great deal that was monstrously absurd— they believed it simply because it was told to them—in short, they believed a great deal too much; but in that excess of belief was comprehended a faith in the invaluable truths which were just now referred to. Of such truths the early legends are symbolical; and, when my thoughts turn to a history like Hume's, I do not fear to say that it is also legendary in its own way, but the doctrine which it symbolizes is that there is no providence over nations or men. I do not mean that he teaches this merely by silence, but by assertion or

insinuation, that the affairs of this world are governed by chance; and that whenever a religious feeling is manifest as an agency in human events, it is no divine impulse, but a delusion—a folly or a fraud, as if God in anger had cast this earth from him to roll onward with all its miserable freight of humanity beyond his sight and beyond his care. The early popular histories of England contained a large element of belief, and the later history in most general use contains, in an equally large proportion, the element of unbelief; and surely it is, at the least, as irrational to believe too little as to believe too much.

The popular faith in legendary history may be traced to a cause deep seated in human nature. With the progress of cultivation, men become conscious of the high privilege of humanity of connecting itself with times that are gone by; and they feel that there is no more dismal condition than when the past is wholly lost to it. I do not mean the mere pride of ancestry, but that feeling with which the heart searches for its dead kindred. It is an universal sentiment of civilized humanity; it is witnessed in an Old Mortality laboriously renewing the timeworn tombstones of the Covenanters, or in the great Orator of antiquity who knew the power of it, when, nearly two centuries after the great Athenian victory, he put at least a moment's fire into the hearts of his degenerate countrymen as he adjured them by the dead at Marathon.* Every people, as they rise in virtue and intelligence, crave a history of their own; and, for lack of that which is authentic, they welcome the imaginative legend and the rude chronicle. The genuine dignity of the nation

* Demosthenes de Corona, s. 208.