e, the Thebais, and the first Capuchins.

The priestcraft of the East and West, of the Magian, Brahmin, Druid,
and Inca, is expounded in the individual's private life. The cramping
influence of a hard formalist on a young child, in repressing his
spirits and courage, paralyzing the understanding, and that without
producing indignation, but only fear and obedience, and even much
sympathy with the tyranny,--is a familiar fact, explained to the child
when he becomes a man, only by seeing that the oppressor of his youth
is himself a child tyrannized over by those names and words and forms of
whose influence he was merely the organ to the youth. The fact teaches
him how Belus was worshipped and how the Pyramids were built, better
than the discovery by Champollion of the names of all the workmen and
the cost of every tile. He finds Assyria and the Mounds of Cholula at
his door, and himself has laid the courses.

Again, in that protest which each considerate person makes against the
superstition of his times, he repeats step for step the part of old
reformers, and in the search after truth finds, like them, new perils to
virtue. He learns again what moral vigor is needed to supply the girdle
of a superstition. A great licentiousness treads on the heels of a
reformation. How many times in the history of the world has the Luther
of the day had to lament the decay of piety in his own household!
"Doctor," said his wife to Martin Luther, one day, "how is it that
whilst subject to papacy we prayed so often and with such fervor, whilst
now we pray with the utmost coldness and very seldom?"

The advancing man discovers how deep a property he has in
literature,--in all fable as well as in all history. He finds that the
poet was no odd fellow who described strange and impossible situations,
but that universal man wrote by his pen a confession true for one and
true for all. His own secret biography he finds in lines wonderfully
intelligible to him, dotted down before he was born. One after another
he comes up in his private adventures with every fable of Aesop, of
Homer, of Hafiz, of Ariosto, of Chaucer, of Scott, and verifies them
with his own head and hands.

The beautiful fables of the Greeks, being proper creations of the
imagination and not of the fancy, are universal verities. What a range
of meanings and what perpetual pertinence has the story of Prometheus!
Beside its primary value as the first chapter of the history of Europe