Although the distinction between radical and poetical metaphor is very essential, and helps us more than anything else toward a clear perception of the origin of fables, it must be admitted that there are cases where it is difficult to carry out this distinction. If modern poets call the clouds mountains, this is clearly poetical metaphor; for mountain, by itself, never means cloud. But when we see that in the Veda the clouds are constantly called parvat", and that parvata means, etymologically, knotty or rugged, it is difficult to say positively whether in India the clouds were called mountains by a simple poetical metaphor, or whether both the clouds and the mountains were from the beginning conceived as full of ruggedness and undulation, and thence called parvata. The result, however, is the same, namely, mythology; for if in the Veda it is said that the Maruts or storms make the mountains to tremble (i. 39, 5), or pass through the mountains (i. 116, 20), this, though meaning originally that the storms made the clouds shake, or passed through the clouds, came to mean, in the eyes of later commentators, that the Maruts actually shook the mountains or rent them asunder. APPENDIX TO LECTURE VIII. Dr. Sonne, in several learned articles published in "Kuhn's Zeitschrift" (x. 96, 161, 321, 401), has subjected my conjecture as to the identity of harit and ง cháris to the most searching criticism. On most points I fully agree with him, as he will see from the more complete statement of my views given in this Lecture; and I feel most grateful to him for much additional light which his exhaustive treatise has thrown on the subject. We differ as to the original meaning of the root ghar, which Dr. Sonne takes to be effusion or shedding of light, while I ascribe to it the meaning of glittering and fatness; yet we meet again in the explanation of such words as ghrinâ, pity; háras, wrath; hrini, wrath; hrinite, he is angry (p. 100). These meanings Dr. Sonne explains by a reference to the Russian kraska, color; krasnoi, red, beautiful; krasa, beauty; krasnji, to blush; krasovatisja, to rejoice. Dr. Sonne is certainly right in doubting the identity of chairō and Sanskrit hṛish, the Latin horreo, and in explaining chairō as the Greek form of ghar, to be bright and glad, conjugated according to the fourth class. Whether the Sanskrit haryati, he desires, is the Greek thélei, seems to me doubtful. Why Dr. Sonne should prefer to identify cháris, cháritos, with the Sanskrit hári, rather than with harit, he does not state. Is it on account of the accent? I certainly think that there was a form cháris, corresponding to hári, and I should derive from it the accusative chárin, instead of charita; also adjectives like charteis (harivat). But I should certainly retain the base which we have in harit, in order to explain such forms as cháris, cháritos. That chárit in Greek ever passed through the same metamorphosis as the Sanskrit harít, that it ever to a Greek mind conveyed the meaning of horse, there is no evidence whatever. Greek and Sanskrit myths, like Greek and Sanskrit words, must be treated as coördinate, not as subordinate; nor have I ever, as far as I recollect, referred Greek myths or Greek words to Sanskrit as their prototypes. What I said about the Charites was very little. On page 81 of my 66 Essay on Comparative Mythology,” I said: "In other passages, however, they (the Harits) take a more human form; and as the Dawn, which is sometimes simply called aśvá, the mare, is well known by the name of the sister, these Harits also are called the Seven Sisters (vii. 66, 15); and in one passage (ix. 86, 37) they appear as the Harits with beautiful wings. After this I need hardly say that we have here the prototype of the Grecian Charites." If on any other occasion I had derived Greek from Sanskrit myths, or, as Dr. Sonne expresses it, ethnic from ethnic myths, instead of deriving both from a common Aryan or pro-ethnic source, my words might have been liable to misapprehension. But as they stand in my essay, they were only intended to point out that after tracing the Harits to their most primitive source, and after showing how, starting from thence, they entered on their mythological career in India, we might discover there, in their earliest form, the mould in which the myth of the Greek Charites was cast, while such epithets as "the sisters," and 1 I ought to mention, however, that Mr. Cox, in the Introduction to his Tales of the Gods and Heroes, p. 67, has understood my words in the same sense as Dr. Sonne. "The horses of the sun," he writes, "are called Harits; and in these we have the prototype of the Greek Charites, inverse transmutation, for while in the other instances the human is changed into a brute personality, in this the beasts are converted into maidens." an "with beautiful wings," might indicate how conceptions that remained sterile in Indian mythology, grew up under a Grecian sky into those charming human forms which we have all learned to admire in the Graces of Hellas. That I had recognized the personal identity, if we may say so, of the Greek Charis, the Aphrodite, the Dawn, and the Sanskrit Ushas, the dawn, will be seen from a short sentence towards the end of my essay, p. 86: "He (Eros) is the youngest of the gods, the son of Zeus, the friend of the Chariles, also the son of the chief Charis, Aphrodite, in whom we can hardly fail to discover a female Eros (an Usha, dawn, instead of an Agni aushasya).” Dr. Sonne will thus perceive that our roads, even where they do not exactly coincide, run parallel, and that we work in the same spirit and with the same objects in view. LECTURE IX. THE MYTHOLOGY OF THE GREEKS. To those who are acquainted with the history of Greece, and have learnt to appreciate the intellectual, moral, and artistic excellences of the Greek mind, it has often been a subject of wonderment how such a nation could have accepted, could have tolerated for a moment, such a religion. What the inhabitants of the small city of Athens achieved in philosophy, in poetry, in art, in science, in politics, is known to all of us; and our admiration for them increases tenfold if, by a study of other literatures, such as the literatures of India, Persia, and China, we are enabled to compare their achievements with those of other nations of antiquity. The rudiments of almost everything, with the exception of religion, we, the people of Europe, the heirs to a fortune accumulated during twenty or thirty centuries of intellectual toil, owe to the Greeks; and, strange as it may sound, but few, I think, would gainsay it, that to the present day the achievements of these our distant ancestors and earliest masters, the songs of Homer, the dialogues of Plato, the speeches of Demosthenes, and the statues of Phidias stand, if not unrivalled, at least unsurpassed by anything that has been achieved by their descendants and pupils. How |