y will tend to fix in memory the leading
fact of each story, they will help to the attainment of a correct
pronunciation of the proper names, and they will enrich the memory with
many gems of poetry, some of them such as are most frequently quoted or
alluded to in reading and conversation.

Having chosen mythology as connected with literature for our province,
we have endeavored to omit nothing which the reader of elegant
literature is likely to find occasion for. Such stories and parts of
stories as are offensive to pure taste and good morals are not given.
But such stories are not often referred to, and if they occasionally
should be, the English reader need feel no mortification in confessing
his ignorance of them.

Our work is not for the learned, nor for the theologian, nor for the
philosopher, but for the reader of English literature, of either sex,
who wishes to comprehend the allusions so frequently made by public
speakers, lecturers, essayists, and poets, and those which occur in
polite conversation.

In the "Stories of Gods and Heroes" the compiler has endeavored to
impart the pleasures of classical learning to the English reader, by
presenting the stories of Pagan mythology in a form adapted to modern
taste. In "King Arthur and His Knights" and "The Mabinogeon" the
attempt has been made to treat in the same way the stories of the
second "age of fable," the age which witnessed the dawn of the several
states of Modern Europe.

It is believed that this presentation of a literature which held
unrivalled sway over the imaginations of our ancestors, for many
centuries, will not be without benefit to the reader, in addition to
the amusement it may afford. The tales, though not to be trusted for
their facts, are worthy of all credit as pictures of manners; and it is
beginning to be held that the manners and modes of thinking of an age
are a more important part of its history than the conflicts of its
peoples, generally leading to no result. Besides this, the literature
of romance is a treasure-house of poetical material, to which modern
poets frequently resort. The Italian poets, Dante and Ariosto, the
English, Spenser, Scott, and Tennyson, and our own Longfellow and
Lowell, are examples of this.

These legends are so connected with each other, so consistently adapted
to a group of characters strongly individualized in Arthur, Launcelot,
and their compeers, and so lighted up by the fires of imagination and
inv