ng that
takes place upon the earth. Even the secondary divinity Helios possesses
this prerogative to a certain extent.

Next to a Hebrew, Mr. Gladstone prefers a Phoenician ancestry for the
Greek divinities. But the same lack of acquaintance with the old Aryan
mythology vitiates all his conclusions. No doubt the Greek mythology is
in some particulars tinged with Phoenician conceptions. Aphrodite was
originally a purely Greek divinity, but in course of time she acquired
some of the attributes of the Semitic Astarte, and was hardly improved
by the change. Adonis is simply a Semitic divinity, imported into
Greece. But the same cannot be proved of Poseidon; [154] far less of
Hermes, who is identical with the Vedic Sarameyas, the rising wind,
the son of Sarama the dawn, the lying, tricksome wind-god, who invented
music, and conducts the souls of dead men to the house of Hades, even
as his counterpart the Norse Odin rushes over the tree-tops leading
the host of the departed. When one sees Iris, the messenger of Zeus,
referred to a Hebrew original, because of Jehovah's promise to Noah, one
is at a loss to understand the relationship between the two conceptions.
Nothing could be more natural to the Greeks than to call the rainbow the
messenger of the sky-god to earth-dwelling men; to call it a token set
in the sky by Jehovah, as the Hebrews did, was a very different thing.
We may admit the very close resemblance between the myth of Bellerophon
and Anteia, and that of Joseph and Zuleikha; but the fact that the Greek
story is explicable from Aryan antecedents, while the Hebrew story is
isolated, might perhaps suggest the inference that the Hebrews were the
borrowers, as they undoubtedly were in the case of the myth of Eden.
Lastly, to conclude that Helios is an Eastern deity, because he reigns
in the East over Thrinakia, is wholly unwarranted. Is not Helios pure
Greek for the sun? and where should his sacred island be placed, if not
in the East? As for his oxen, which wrought such dire destruction to the
comrades of Odysseus, and which seem to Mr. Gladstone so anomalous, they
are those very same unhappy cattle, the clouds, which were stolen by the
storm-demon Cacus and the wind-deity Hermes, and which furnished endless
material for legends to the poets of the Veda.

But the whole subject of comparative mythology seems to be terra
incognita to Mr. Gladstone. He pursues the even tenour of his way in
utter disregard of Grimm, and K