summoned, and dismissed, to suggest that they have been brought in for
their own sweet sakes.

It was thus with all the fine quintessences of ancient lore, with all
the pearl-like accretions of the faiths and fancies of the old world:
they were handled about freely as a kind of curious but not so very
rare coins, which found no currency in the deeper thoughts of our
modern humanity, and could therefore be used as a mere badge of the
learning and taste of a literary 'coterie'.

The very names of the ancient gods and heroes were in fact assuming
that abstract anaemic look which common nouns have in everyday
language. Thus, when Garrick, in his verses _Upon a Lady's
Embroidery_, mentions 'Arachne', it is obvious that he does not expect
the reader to think of the daring challenger of Minerva's art, or the
Princess of Lydia, but just of a plain spider. And again, when
Falconer, in his early _Monody on the death of the Prince of Wales_,
expresses a rhetorical wish

'to aid hoarse howling Boreas with his sighs,'

that particular son of Astraeus, whose love for the nymph Orithyia was
long unsuccessful, because he could not 'sigh', is surely far from the
poet's mind; and 'to swell the wind', or 'the gale', would have served
his turn quite as well, though less 'elegantly'.

Even Gibbon, with all his partiality for whatever was pre- or post-
Christian, had indeed no better word than 'elegant' for the ancient
mythologies of Greece and Rome, and he surely reflected no
particularly advanced opinion when he praised and damned, in one