foreign sources than originating in a national inspiration. In speaking of inmost thought we refer to the ethics of life, the faith as to God and man, and omit consideration of the phases of intellectual scepticism, or the progress of physical science.

But there is a reason why we should do well to turn more lovingly to the Greek thinkers, from the Gnomic Poet to the Stoic Sage; and that is, that what they do think they think clearly, so that their expression is like the perfect carving of a statue-firm, full, and artistic in form.

In case of question as to the neglect referred to, it may be sufficient to point to the fact that there is no modern text, and no recent translation whatever, published in this country of the literary remains of the school of Pythagoras; that the works of a voluminous English Platonist of a former generation are scarce in the book market, because when they emerge from old libraries they are demanded for America. That it is only within a year or two that Epictetus has appeared in the series of translations that includes most of the works of the dramatists, the historians, and the orators of Greek-speaking tribes; that of the remains of Heraclitus, Empedocles, Menander, Epicurus, Cleanthes-to take names almost at random-there is no English version to be found; while Anacreon and Theocritus, as representing the gayest poetry of paganism pure and simple, have, notwithstanding the anomaly in a professedly anti-pagan land, enjoyed a considerable currency.

Linus is the name of the most ancient Greek poet, and is mentioned in the "Iliad." Not prose, but poetry only, was literature in Greece in his day and the poet was the thinker. He is, according to one legend, son of Apollo and of the

:

muse of choric dancing; to another of Hermes, and the muse of the azure robe; and the invention of the rhythm of verse and melody of music is ascribed to him. Hercules, blind Thamyris, and Orpheus are said to have been among his disciples. He is reputed to have written in Pelasgian characters, which Herodotus calls a barbarous, or extra-Hellenic, language. The probable date of the Pelasgian epoch is about seventeen centuries before our era, a time when Egypt was in the height of her glory, and just changing from an Asiatic to a national dynastic line, when India was at its Vedic period, and Moses was not yet born. The Pelasgian tribe (rovers, wandering storks," as the name probably implies) is acknowledged to have brought into rude Greece a religious system and theology, to have established the Dodona oracle, and instituted the Cabeiric mysteries, which seem to have had a Phoenician origin.

The primitive character of the time is shown by the remains of its massy walls, formed of polygonal blocks of stone, roughly wrought rather by friction than by chisel.

Though Linus himself is named in Homer and Herodotus, we only have fragments of his poems on the doubtful authority of collectors of fifteen to twenty-two centuries after his time; so that, although it would be pleasant to note with what optimism philosophy begins in the land that bore so much of beauty, we must doubt whether we have any evidence of the fact, or whether the following are veritable words of Linus:

"In all things we must hope; for

nothing at all is hopeless. All things are easy unto God to perfect, and nothing is vain. Mark how all by struggle is controlled throughout.

having ends.

What sort of source had this that is as it is?

Immortal death so wraps all with mortality

All corruptible dies, and what subsists doth alter its guise, With shows in circles of change

and fashions of formThat veiled is the sight of the

whole it will be incorruptible. And ever-during, insomuch as it has reached what it is.

The seventh day is of the good,

the seventh is the birthday: Of the first things is the seventh,

the seventh the consummation."

Tradition carries on his name as that of a song or lay, sung by a boy to the cithara, while the vintagers are at work. As the name has been found in Phoenicia, Cyprus, and Egypt, perhaps Linus is only a tradition of music; an embodiment of a soft, simple, plaintive melody. The Greek word ailinos which represents a crooning dirge, is said to be derived from a cry signifying Ah for me Linos.

In our word" linen" perhaps we have the clue to the origin of at least the name "Linus," in the flaxen string of the cithara.

Early Greek history is a singular compound of the poetically mythic with probable facts. Inachus from Phoenicia, who builds Argos, and Cecrops from Egypt, who institutes the Areopagus, stand in the list of early kings with Amphictyon, who is the offspring of a sort of Greek Noah. Cadmus introduces the alphabet from Phoenicia, Danaus brings a colony from Egypt, Minos brings from Crete laws that lasted a thousand years, and side by side with them is Eumolpus, reputed the son of Poseidon, the sea god. He migrates from Thrace to Attica, and is initiated into the Eleusinian

earthly plenty, Demeter, of which he becomes hierophant. Of the family of Eumolpus, whose descendants presided over the spiritualistic mysteries and claimed from father to son the prophetic gift, was Museus the bard, placed at 1426 B.C. in the Arundel marbles. From him, the servant of the muses, comes our word" museum." His words come down to us that for mortals of brief span of life the sweetest refuge is to sing.

How often from heroic times, when life is heartily enjoyed, comes that undertone of lament for its shortness, and consciousness of necessity of a sturdy cheerfulness. In periods when the flower of national life seems overblown, the days are too full of surfeit for either young or old to cry so eagerly for more of them.

The following are among the fragments of Musæus :

"For ever Art than Strength is better far."

In this single line, so trite in the midst of civilisation, we see the progress of a young community. The following is more significant of an ethical bent:

"Like as the fruitful earth produceth leaves

Some on the ash tree die while others grow Leaves of the race of men, they eddy too."

And the following shows the belief in an encompassing cloud of spiritual vicegerents of God as having to do with the direction or perhaps marks the position held by the oracle in the religious idea of the time:

of men,

"Gladly to hear what the immortal

ones

To men assigned, from cowards marks the brave."

It is significant how in times of simplicity of life, when men are in the perfection of physical health, and, on a materialistic hypothesis, there would seem no reason to expect an under-current of mystery, the problem of life with its spiritual solution is yet ever present. Musæus, though a priest, is a believer; it is a most arrogant and absurd assumption that the prophetic leaders of men were always laughing in their sleeves, and practising deceits for a wage. A servant of the oracle, he proclaims that to live in blind revel of animal existence is cowardly; to open the eyes and ears, and face what gleams and whispers of destiny may be caught from the undying world in its relation with men, is the clearest sign that marks a noble and brave

man.

The name of Orpheus has so much allied with it, that we may fairly imagine it to have been borne by a line of hierophants, and to have been made to stand for the mystical legends of a cycle. Clement of Alexandria records the opinions of his time about the legend : "Onomacritus the Athenian, who is said to have been the author of the poems inscribed to Orpheus, is ascertained to have lived in the reign of the Pisistratidæ, about the fiftieth Olympiad [the early part of the 6th century B.C.]; and Orpheus, who sailed with Hercules, was the pupil of Museus. Amphion precedes the Trojan war by two generations. the Crateres of Orpheus are said to be the production of Zopyrus of Heraclea, and The Descent to Hades that of Prodicus of Samos. Ion of Chios relates ... that Pythagoras ascribed certain works of his own to Orpheus. Epigenes, in his book respecting The Poetry ascribed to Orpheus, says that The Descent to Hades and the Sacred Discourse

were the production of Cecrops the Pythagorean; and the Peplus and the Physics of Brontinus." This account is very hearsay to us, since a very large number of the books which Clement cites are lostprobably having perished in the library in which he wrote. But the confused rumours point at least to an Orphic traditional lore which was familiar to Pythagoras.

Plato refers to "what is called

the Orphic life” as a discipline including among its tenets the doctrine of abstinence from all things that had life, which would point to a brotherhood of the Indian order, where bodily purification is an essential. The story of Triptolemus, the minister of the goddess Demeter, to whom Plato refers also as representing that period, is a legend showing a familiarity with speculation upon the relation of body and soul. Triptolemus is so favoured by the earth-mother, on a special ground of gratitude, that she feeds him with her own milk and places him on burning coals during the night to destroy the particles of mortality he had received from his parents. The natural mother, giver of that body which is being transformed, so marvels at the unearthly growth of her son, that she spies on Demeter and the process is disturbed.

Of Orpheus the best known story is that of his descent into Hades. Having lost his wife, he gains, through the music of a lyre received from Apollo, an admission to the under-world, soothing even Cerberus, the dog-guardian of Hades, with his strain. The deities of that region consent to restore his lost bride, provided that on departing he forbears looking behind him until he exchanges their borders for those of earth. He promises, but either curiosity as to the process of the re-incarnation, or

his pent-up love for his wife yet unseen, or a doubt whether she is actually following him, presumably gets the better of him. He sees her, but it is only for a moment; she vanishes in a dissolving vision, and can be found no more.

Such stories as these it has been the fashion of late years to take as mythological representations of natural facts; and some of the simply poetic impersonations of Greek fable no doubt are to be so accounted for. But the theory has been run to death, and has been too much of a mere theory. When we find in Egypt, long before the rudest beginnings of Greece, the religious doctrine of an under-world with its Typhonic beast, to which Cerberus corresponds, and find also in Aryan books accounts of a similar entry into Hades, we are bound to take such a Greek tradition as the above to be derived from these foreign sources, and to have been in its essence passed on from one priest to another as occult religious lore, rather than originating as the spontaneous outgrowth of a naturalistic poet.

What Orpheus is said to have known must constitute the body of learning of a whole period at least. He is supposed to have left behind metric writings on theology and cosmogony, hymns, epigrams, treatises on agriculture, physics, astrology, precious stones, botany, chorography, medicine, laws, and matters relating to Argos. What we have now under his name is but little, and probably most, if not all of it, of later date than that of the Orphic tradition. In fact, to such critical minds as Aristotle, Cicero, and Suidas, it appeared probable that no single versicle certainly attributable to Orpheus was then in existence. That there once were in existence true Orphic verses there seems little doubt; whether

the Pythagorean or Egyptian school fairly represented the originals in what is given as Orphic it would be difficult to judge. The following are specimens:

"I will utter to such as have the right, the doors

Close ye forthwith on the profane!"

or

"Close ye upon your ears, profane!" "But thou,

Hearken, Musæus, son of lightbearing moon,

For truth I will declare, and let not things

That formerly your bosom cogitated Amerce you of dear life. But looking toward

The word divine, hang closely over it,

Keeping aright the heart's perceptive frame.

Yea enter well the path without a turn,

And gaze upon the universal King. He is one, self-proceeding; from the one

Are all things born evolved; circling he acts

Himself in them; himself no mortal sees,

But he sees all. To mortals are his gifts,

Evil come after good, and bloody

The first lines quoted under the name of Orpheus are perhaps more likely to be authentic than the rest, as belonging to the period when religious rites were jealously guarded from any but the initiated. The great ones were few-princes who were the centre of the community's wealth, and had ornaments and drinking vessels of gold, while the bulk of the people were in a state of almost savage simplicity, touched by bravery, poetry, and superstition. As the palace was inaccessible to the community, in whom the rich valuables might but awaken a passion of rapine, so was the shrine of religious studies also secluded, that no interloper should disturb the repose necessary for the commune of the priestesses with the invisible world, and that no one receiving truths within an unprepared mind should alarm the vulgar and destroy by force the only centres of profound wisdom.

Thomas Taylor, the Platonist, in his study of Orpheus, very fairly shows that the hymns bearing the name were at least destined for use

breath of all,

They are, in fact, sacrificial invoca