with our old writers--the epithet jovial, which is derived from
the Latin name of its head. It is a life of all the pleasures of
mind and body, of banquet and of revel, of music and of song; a
life in which solemn grandeur alternates with jest and gibe; a
life of childish willfulness and of fretfulness, combined with
serious, manly, and imperial cares; for the Olympus of Homer has
at least this one recommendation to esteem--that it is not peopled
with the merely lazy and selfish gods of Epicurus, but its
inhabitants busily deliberate on the government of man, and in
their debates the cause of justice wins.

"I do not now discuss the moral titles of the Olympian scheme;
what I dwell upon is its intense humanity, alike in its greatness
and its littleness, its glory and its shame. As the cares and
joys of human life, so the structure of society below is reflected,
by the wayward wit of man, on heaven above. Though the names and
fundamental traditions of the several deities were wholly or in
great part imported from abroad, their characters, relations, and
attributes passed under a Hellenizing process, which gradually
marked off for them special provinces and functions, according to
laws which appear to have been mainly original and indigenous,
and to have been taken by analogy from the division of labor in
political society. The Olympian society has its complement of
officers and servants, with their proper functions. He-phaes'tus
(or Vulcan) moulds the twenty golden thrones which move
automatically to form the circle of the council of the gods, and
builds for each of his brother deities a separate palace in the
deep-folded recesses of the mighty mountain. Music and song are
supplied by Apollo and the Muses; Gan-y-me'de and He'be are the
cup-bearers, Hermes and Iris are the messengers; but Themis, in