MY YOUNG ALCIDES

A FADED PHOTOGRAPH

by

Charlotte M Yonge




PREFACE


Ideas have a tyrannous power of insisting on being worked out, even
when one fears they may be leading in a track already worthily
preoccupied.

But the Hercules myth did not seem to me to be like one of the fairy
tales that we have seen so gracefully and quaintly modernised; and at
the risk of seeming to travestie the Farnese statue in a shooting-
coat and wide-awake, I could not help going on, as the notion grew
deeper and more engrossing.

For, whether the origin of the myth be, or be not, founded on solar
phenomena, the yearning Greek mind formed on it an unconscious
allegory of the course of the Victor, of whom the Sun, rejoicing as a
giant to run his course, is another type, like Samson of old, since
the facts of nature and of history are Divine parables.