emporaries--no allegories at all, but the plain
embodiment of a fact in which the artist believed; not only "the
communion of all saints," but also their habit of assisting, often in
visible form, the Christians of his own time.

These distinctions may seem over-subtle, but our meaning will surely
be plain to anyone who will compare "The Faerie Queen," or the legend
of St. George, with the Gnostic or Hindoo reveries, and the fantastic
and truly Eastern interpretation of Scripture, which the European
monks borrowed from Egypt. Our opinion is, that in the old legends
the moral did not create the story, but the story the moral; and that
the story had generally a nucleus of fact within all its distortions
and exaggerations. This holds good of the Odinic and Grecian myths;
all are now more or less inclined to believe that the deities of
Zeus's or Odin's dynasties were real conquerors or civilisers of
flesh and blood, like the Manco Capac of the Peruvians, and that it
was around records of their real victories over barbarous aborigines,
and over the brute powers of nature, that extravagant myths grew up,
till more civilised generations began to say: "These tales must have
some meaning--they must be either allegories or nonsense;" and then
fancied that in the remaining thread of fact they found a clue to the
mystic sense of the whole.

Such, we suspect, has been the history of St. George and the Dragon,
as well as of Apollo and the Python. It is very hard to have to give
up the dear old dragon who haunted our nursery dreams, especially
when there is no reason for it. We have no patience with antiquaries
who tell us that the dragons who guarded princesses were merely "the
winding walls or moats of their castles." What use then, pray, was
there in the famous nether garment with which Regnar Lodbrog (shaggy-
trousers) choked the dragon who guarded his lady-love? And Regnar
was a real piece of flesh and blood, as King AElla and our Saxon
forefathers found to their cost; his awful death-dirge, and the
effect which it produced, are well known to historians. We cannot
give up Regnar's trousers, for we suspect the key to the whole
dragon-question is in the pocket of them.

Seriously, Why should not those dragons have been simply what the
Greek word dragon means--what the earliest romances, the Norse myths,
and the superstitions of the peasantry in many parts of England to
this day assert them to have been--"mighty worms," h