ur greatest goddesses for their governesses. Athena
teaches them domestic accomplishments, how to weave, and sew, and the
like; Artemis teaches them to hold themselves up straight; Hera, how to
behave proudly and oppressively to company; and Aphrodite, delightful
governess, feeds them with cakes and honey all day long. All goes well,
until just the time when they are going to be brought out; then there is
a great dispute whom they are to marry, and in the midst of it they are
carried off by the Harpies, given by them to be slaves to the Furies, and
never seen more. But of course there is nothing in Greek myths; and one
never heard of such things as vain desires, and empty hopes, and clouded
passions, defiling and snatching away the souls of maidens, in a London
season.

I have no time to trace for you any more harpy legends, though they are
full of the most curious interest; but I may confirm for you my
interpretation of this one, and prove its importance in the Greek mind,
by noting that Polygnotus painted these maidens, in his great religious
series of paintings at Delphi, crowned with flowers, and playing at dice;
and that Penelope remembers them in her last fit of despair, just before
the return of Ulysses, and prays bitterly that she may be snatched away
at once into nothingness by the Harpies, like Pandareos' daughters,
rather than be tormented longer by her deferred hope, and anguish of
disappointed love.

25. I have hitherto spoken only of deities of the winds. We pass now to
a far more important group, the deities of cloud. Both of these are
subordinate to the ruling power of the air, as the demigods of the
fountains and minor seas are to the great deep; but, as the
cloud-firmament detaches itself more from the air, and has a wider range
of ministry than the minor streams and seas, the highest cloud deity,
Hermes, has a rank more equal with Athena than Nereus or Proteus with
Neptune; and there is greater difficulty in tracing his character,
because his physical dominion over the clouds can, of course, be asserted
only where clouds are; and, therefore, scarcely at all in Egypt;* so that
the changes which Hermes undergoes in becoming a Greek from an Egyptian
and Phoenician god, are greater than in any other case of adopted
tradition In Egypt Hermes is a deity of historical record, and a
conductor of the dead to judgment; the Greeks take away much of this
historical function, assigning it to the Muses; but