overthrow the Jews are to be restored to their own land, and live under
the government of their long-expected Messiah."

To return to illustrations less remote, and of a more familiar nature:--

An ill-bred. Londoner calls a shilling a _hog_, and half-a-crown a
_bull_. He little knows what havoc he is making with our modern
theorists, who assert that nothing is worthy of belief, or ought to be
relied upon, before the era of "legitimate" or written "history." These
terms corroborate and identify themselves with the most ancient of
traditionary customs, long ere princes had monopolised the surface of
coined money with their own images and superscriptions. They are
identical with the very name of money among the early Romans, which was
_pecunia_, from _pecus_, a flock. Among the same people, it is well
known, the word _stipulatio_ signified the striking of a bargain, which
was done by placing two straws, _stipes_, one across the other. The same
mode is practised to this day in the Isle of Man, existing, in all
probability, from a period earlier than the foundation of Rome itself.
Is the coincidence accidental or traditional? If the latter, what a
history it tells of the migration of the species!

How much might be written of amulets, cups, and horns of magical power,
from the divining cup of Genesis to the Amalthean horns, and the goblet
of Oberon, which he gave to Huon of Bordeaux, the supernatural power of
which, passing into an hundred shapes of fiction, may be found in our
baronial halls--a pledge, to a certain extent, like the invulnerability
of Achilles, of the good fortune of its possessor. It is wonderful that
Shakespeare, who is so happy in the verisimilitude of his fairy lore,
and so apt to embellish his plot with its mythology, should not have
thought of causing the king-making Earl of Warwick to lose the horn of