fable. An unbiassed study of antiquity, however, will soon dispel that idea. Besides the gods whom we may plausibly regard as impersonations of natural forces, there existed others; the spirits of ancestors, the gods of the hearth, and the ideal patrons of war and the arts. Even the gods of Nature inspired reverence and secured a cultus only as they influenced the well-being of man. The worship of them had a practical import. The conception of their nature and presence became a sanction and an inspiration in the conduct of life. When the figments of the fancy are wholly divorced from reality they can have no clearness or consistency; they can have no permanence when they are wholly devoid of utility. The vividness and persistence of the figures of many of the gods came from the fact that they were associated with institutions and practices which controlled the conception of them and kept it young. The fictions of a poet, whatever his genius, do not produce illusion because they do not attach themselves to realities in the world of action. They have character without power and names without local habitations. The gods in the beginning had both. Their image, their haunts, the reports of their apparitions and miracles, gave a nucleus of empirical reality to the accretions of legend. The poet who came to sing their praise, to enlarge upon their exploits, and to explain their cultus, gave less to the gods in honour than he received from them in inspiration. All his invention was guided by the genius of the deity, as represented by the traditions of his shrine. This poetry, then, even in its most playful mood, is not mere poetry, but religion. It is a poetry in which men believe; it is a poetry that beautifies and justifies to their minds the positive facts of their ancestral worship, their social unity, and their personal conscience.

These general reflections may help us to approach the hymns of Homer in a becoming spirit. For in them we find the extreme of fancy, the approach to a divorce between the imagination and the faith of the worshipper. Consequently there is danger that we may allow ourselves to read these lives of the gods as the composition of a profane poet. If we did so we should fail to understand not only their spirit as a whole but many of their parts, in which notes are struck now of devotion and affectionate pride, now of gratitude and entreaty. These may be addressed, it is true, to a being that has just been described as guilty of some signal vice or treachery, and the contradiction may well stagger a Puritan critic. But the lusts of life were once for all in the blood of the Pagan gods, who were the articulate voices of Nature and of passion. The half-meant exaggeration of a well-known 

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