lding is turned out of this world, and must die. And our notion of
written leases is as out of place in a world without writing and
without reading as a House of Commons among Andaman Islanders. Only one
check, one sole shield for life and good, is then possible;--usage. And
it is but too plain how in such places and periods men cling to customs
because customs alone stand between them and starvation.

A still more powerful cause co-operated, if a cause more powerful can
be imagined. Dryden had a dream of an early age, 'when wild in woods
the noble savage ran;' but 'when lone in woods the cringing savage
crept' would have been more like all we know of that early, bare,
painful period. Not only had they no comfort, no convenience, not the
very beginnings of an epicurean life, but their mind within was as
painful to them as the world without. It was full of fear. So far as
the vestiges inform us, they were afraid of everything; they were
afraid of animals, of certain attacks by near tribes, and of possible
inroads from far tribes. But, above all things, they were frightened of
'the world;' the spectacle of nature filled them with awe and dread.
They fancied there were powers behind it which must be pleased,
soothed, flattered, and this very often in a number of hideous ways. We
have too many such religions, even among races of great cultivation.
Men change their religions more slowly than they change anything else;
and accordingly we have religions 'of the ages'--(it is Mr. Jowett who
so calls them)--of the 'ages before morality;' of ages of which the
civil life, the common maxims, and all the secular thoughts have long
been dead. 'Every reader of the classics,' said Dr. Johnson, 'finds
their mythology tedious.' In that old world, which is so like our
modern world in so many things, so much more like than many far more
recent, or some that live beside us, there is a part in which we seem
to have no kindred, which we stare at, of which we cannot think how it
could be credible, or how it came to be thought of. This is the archaic
part of that very world which we look at as so ancient; an 'antiquity'
which descended to them, hardly altered, perhaps, from times long
antecedent, which were as unintelligible to them as to us, or more so.
How this terrible religion--for such it was in all living detail,
though we make, and the ancients then made, an artistic use of the more
attractive bits of it--weighed on man, the great poem of