rage reader_.' Even Mr. Ruskin suffers in
this connection. In The Queen of the Air he has given us one of his most
delightful books, but there are probably few, outside the circle of
philologists and comparative mythologists, who have not thought in
reading the lovely interpretations of the myths of Athena, that there
was more of Ruskin than of the Ancient Greek in the meaning evolved.
Somehow, it seems easier to think that these things were conceived by a
Professor of Art in the nineteenth century, than that they were the
deliberate convictions of a primitive people ever so many centuries
before Christ--a people, too, known to be steeped in sensualities, and
addicted to very barbarous practices.

Are there, then, reasons for supposing that comparative mythologists are
not always right--that, in fact, their science is but a doubtful science
after all? Mr. Andrew Lang boldly says that there are. In Custom and
Myth his object is to show the connection between savage customs--or
rather the customs of savage and uncivilized races--and ancient myths.
But before this branch of Storyology is reached, we must consider the
question of the relation between our familiar nursery-tales, the
folk-lore of our own and other countries, and the old romances, with
these same myths. There is something more than monotony in the theory
which 'resolves most of our old romances into a series of remarks about
the weather.' The author of Primitive Culture (Mr. Tylor) rebels against
this theory. There is no legend, no allegory, no nursery-rhyme, he says,
safe from it, and, as an amusing illustration, he supposes the Song of
Sixpence to be thus interpreted by the mythologists. Obviously, the
four-and-twenty blackbirds are four-and-twenty hours, and the pie to
hold them is the underlying earth covered with the over-arching sky. How
true a touch of nature is it, 'when the pie is opened,' that is, when
day breaks, 'the birds begin to sing!' The King is the Sun, and his
'counting out his money' is pouring out the sunshine, the golden shower
of Danae; the Queen is the Moon, and her transparent honey the
moonlight. The maid is the rosy-fingered Dawn, who rises before the Sun,
her master, and hangs out the clothes (the clouds) across the sky; the
particular blackbird who so tragically ends the tale, by 'nipping off
her nose,' is the hour of sunrise. The time-honoured rhyme really wants,
as Mr. Tylor remarks, only one thing to prove it a sun-myth, and that