king, had become like a second father to his unhappy daughter. The new prince observing the melancholy which he scarcely affected to repress, and seeing him look up occasionally at a picture which had a veil over it, asked him what the picture was that seemed to disturb him so, and why it was veiled. "If it be the portrait of the late king," said Doracles, " pray think me worthy of doing honour to it, for he was a noble prince. Unveil it, pray. I insist upon it. What? Am I not worthy to look upon my predecessors, Phorbas?" And at these words, he frowned impatiently. Phorbas, with a trembling hand, but not for want of courage, withdrew the black covering; and the portrait of Daphles, in all her youth and beauty, flashed upon the eyes of Do`racles. It was not a melancholy face. It was drawn before misfortune had touched it, and sparkled with a blooming beauty, in which animal spirits and good-nature contended for predominance. Doracles paused, and seemed struck. "The possessor of that face," said he, inquiringly, "could never have been so sorrowful, as I have heard?" "Pardon me, Sir," answered Phorbas; "I was as another father to her, and knew all." "It cannot be," returned the prince. The old man begged his other guests to withdraw a while, and then told Doracles how many fond and despairing things the queen had said of him, both before her wits began to fail, and after. "Her wits to fail?" murmured the king: "I have known what it is to feel almost a mad impatience of the will; but I knew not that these - gentle creatures, women, could so feel for such a trifle." Phorbas brought out the laurel-crown, and told him how it was that the half of it became bare. The impatient blood of Doracles mounted, but not in anger, to his face; and breaking up the party, he requested that the picture might be removed to his own chamber, promising to return it. A whole year however did he keep it; and as he had no foreign enemies to occupy his time, nor was disposed to enter into the common sports of peace, it was understood that he spent the greatest part of his time, when he was not in council, in the room where the picture hung. In truth, the image of the once smiling Daphles haunted him wherever he went; and to ease himself of the yearning of wishing her alive again and seeing her face, he was in the habit of being with it as much as possible. His self-will turned upon him, even in that gentle shape. Millions of times did he wish back the loving author of his fortunes, whom he had treated with so clownish an ingratitude; and millions of times did the sense of the impotence of his wish run up in red hurry to his cheeks, and help to pull them into a gaunt melancholy. But this is not a repaying sorrow to dwell upon. He was one day, after being in vain expected at council, found lying madly on the floor of the room, dead. He had torn the portrait from the wall. His dagger was in his heart; and his cheek lay upon that blooming and smiling face, which had it been living, would never have looked so at being revenged. Orders received by the Newsmen, by the Booksellers, and by the Publisher, JOSEPH APPLEYARD, No. 19, Catherine-street, Strand,-Price 2d. Printed by C. H. REYNELL, No. 45, Broad-street, Golden-square, London. THE INDICATOR. There he arriving round about doth flie, No. XV.-WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 19th, 1820. SPIRIT OF THE ANCIENT MYTHOLOGY. FROM having a different creed of our own, and always encountering the heathen mythology in a poetical and fabulous shape, we are apt to have a false idea of the religious feeling of the ancients. We are in the habit of supposing, whatever we allow when we come to reason upon the point, that they regarded their fables in the same poetical light as ourselves; that they could not possibly put faith in Jupiter, Neptune, and Pluto; in the sacrifice of innocent turtle doves, the libation of wine, and the notions about Tartarus and Ixion. Undoubtedly there were multitudes of free thinkers in the ancient world. Most of the Greek poets and philosophers appear to have differed with the literal notions of the many.* A system of refined theism is understood to have been taught to the initiated in the celebrated Mysteries. The doctrines of Epicurus were so prevalent in the most intellectual age of Rome, that Lucretius wrote a poem upon them, in which he treats their founder as a divinity; and Virgil, in a wellknown passage of the Georgics; "Felix qui potuit," &c. exalts either Epicurus or Lucretius as a blessed being, who put hell and terror under his feet. A sickly temperament appears to have made him wish, rather than be able, to carry his own scepticism so far: yet he insinuates his disbelief in Tartarus in the sixth book of his epic poem, where Æneas and the Sybil, after the description of the lower world, go out through the ivory gate, which was the passage of false visions. Cæsar, according to a speech of his in Sallust, derided the same notions in open Senate; and Cicero, in other parts of his writings, as well as in a public pleading, speaks of them as fables and impertinence," ineptiis ac fabulis." It is remarkable that Eschylus and Euripides, the two dramatists whose faith in the national religion was most doubted, are said to have met with stranger and violent deaths.-The latter was torn to pieces by dogs, and the former killed by a tortoise which an eagle let fall upon his bald head in mistake for a stone. These exits from the scene look very like the retributive death-beds which the bigots of all religions are so fond of ascribing to one another. + Did Dante forget this, when he took Virgil for his guide through the Inferno? 2d Edition. But however this plain-dealing may look on the part of the men of letters, there is reason to believe that even in those times, the people in general were strong upon points of faith. The extension of the Greek philosophy may have insensibly rendered them familiar with latitudes of interpretation on the part of others. They would not think it impious in Cicero and Cato to have notions of the Supreme Being more consistent with the elevation of their minds. But for themselves, they adhered, from habit, to the literal creed of their ancestors, as the Greek populace had done before them. The jealous enemies of Socrates contrived to have him put to death on a charge of irreverence for the gods. A frolic of the libertine Alcibiades, which to say the defacing least of it, was in very bad taste, the Alcible statutes of Mercury, Wrote creed perhaps only rejected was -was followed with important consequences. The history of Socrates had the effect, in after times, at least in the ancient world, of saving philosophical speculators from the vindictive egotism of opinion. But even in the days of Augustus, Ovid wrote a popular work full of mythological fables; and Virgil whose what was unkindly, gave the hero of his intended popular epic, the particular appellation of Pious. That Augustus should pique himself on the same attribute, proves little; for he a cold-blooded man of the world, and could play the hypocrite for the worst and most despotic purposes. Did he now and then lecture his poetical friends upon this point, respecting their own appearances with the e world? There is a curious ode of Horace (Book 1. Od. 34.) in which he says that he finds himself compelled to give up his sceptical notions, and to attend more, to public worship, because it had thundered one day when the sky was cloudless. The critics are divided in their opinion of his object in this ode. Some think him in earnest, others in jest. It is the only thing of the sort in his works; and is, at all events, of an equivocal character that would serve his purpose on either side of the question. The opinions of the ancients upon religion may be divided into three general classes. The great multitude believed any thing; the very few disbelieved every thing; the philosophers and poets entertained a refined natural religion, which while it pronounced upon nothing, rejected what was evidently unworthy of the spirit of the creation, and regarded the popular deities as personifications of its various workings. All these classes had their extravagances, in proportion to their ignorance, or viciousness, or metaphysical perplexity. The multitude, whose notions were founded on ignorance, habit, and fear, admitted many absurd and some cruel imaginations. The mere man not of the world measured every thing by his own vain and petty standard, and thought the whole goods of the universe a scramble for the cunning and hypocritical. The over-refining followers of Plato, endeavouring to pierce into the nature of things by the mere effort of the will, arrived: at conclusions visible to none but their own yearning and impatient eyes; and lost themselves in the ethereal dogmatisms of Plotinus and Porphyry. The greatest pleasure arising to a modern imagination from the 9 ancient mythology, is in a mingled sense of the old popular belief and of the philosophical refinements upon it. We take Apollo, Tand Mercury, and Venus, as shapes that existed in popular credulity, as the greater fairies of the ancient world; and we regard them, at the same time, as personifications of all that is beautiful and genial in the forms and tendencies of creation. But the result, coming as it does too through avenues of beautiful poetry, both ancient and modern, is so entirely chearful, that we are apt to think it must have wanted gravity to more believing eyes. We fancy that the old world saw nothing in religion but lively and graceful shapes, as remote from the more obscure and awful hintings of the world unknown, as physics appear to be from the metaphysical;- -as the eye of a beautiful woman is from the inward specu lations of a Brahmin; or a lily at noon-day from the wide obscurity of night-time. be This supposition appears to be carried a great deal too far. We will not enquire in this place, how far the mass of mankind, when these shapes were done away, did or did not escape from a despotic anthro pomorphitism; nor how far they were driven by the vaguer fears, and the opening of a more visible eternity, into avoiding the whole subject, rather than courting it; nor how it is, that the nobler practical religion which was afforded them, has been unable to bring back their frightened theology from the angry and avaricious pursuits into which they fled for refuge. But setting aside the portion of terror, of which heathenism partook in common with all faiths originating in uncul tivated times, the ordinary run of pagans were perhaps more impressed with a sense of the invisible world, in consequence of the very visions presented to their imagination, than the same description of men under a more shadowy system. There is the same difference between the two things, as between a populace believing in fairies, and a populace not believing. The latter is in the high road to something better, if not drawn aside into new terrors on the one hand, or mere worldliness: on the other. But the former is led to look out of the mere worldly common-places about it, twenty times to the other's once. It has a sense of a supernatural, state of things, however gross. It has a link with another world, from which something like gravity is sure to strike into the most chearful heart. Every forest, to the mind's eye of a Greek, was haunted with superior intelligences. Every stream had it's{ presiding nymph, who was thanked for the draught of water. Every house had gods, cestors; and which would bless him ad blessed the inmate's an if he cultivated the social affections: for the same world which expressed piety towards the Gods, expressed love towards relations and friends. If in all this there was nothing but the worship of a more graceful humanity, there may be worships much worse as well as much better. And the divinest spirit that ever appeared on earth has told us, that the extension of human sympathy embraces all that is required of us, either to do or to foresee. Imagine the feelings with which an ancient believer must have gone by the oracular oaks of Dodona, or the calm groves of the Eumenides, ཉེ or the fountain where Proserpine vanished under ground with Pluto; or the Great Temple of the Mysteries at Eleusis; or the laurelled mountain Parnassus, on the side of which was the temple of Delphi, where Apollo was supposed to be present in person. Imagine Plutarch, a deyout and yet a liberal believer, when he went to study theology and philosophy at Delphi: with what feelings must he not have passed along the woody paths of the hill, approaching nearer every instant to the presence of the divinity, and not sure that a glance of light through the trees was not the lustre of the god himself going by. This is mere poetry to us, and very fine it is; but to him it was poetry, and religion, and beauty, and gravity, and hushing awe, and a path as from one world to another. With similar feelings he would cross the ocean, an element that naturally detaches the mind from earth, and which the ancients regarded as especially doing so. He had been, in the Carpathian sea, the favourite haunt of Proteus, who was supposed to be gifted above every other deity with a knowledge of the causes of things. Towards evening, when the winds were rising, and the sailors had made their vows to Neptune, he would think of the old "shepherd of the seas of yore," and believe it possible that he might become visible to his eyesight, driving through the, darkling waters, and turning the sacred wildness of his face towards the blessed ship. In all this, there is a deeper sense of another world, than in the habit of contenting oneself with a few vague terms and embodying nothing but Mammon. There is a deeper sense of another world, precisely because there is a deeper sense of the present; of it's varieties, it's be nignities, it's mystery. It was a strong sense of this, which made a living poet, who is accounted very orthodox in his religious opinions, give vent, in that fine sonnet, to his impatience at seeing the beautiful planet we live upon, with all it's starry wonders about it, so little thought of, compared with what is ridiculously called the world. He seems to have dreaded the symptom, as an evidence of materialism, and of the planets being dry self-existing things, peopled with mere successive mortalities, and unconnected with any superintendance or consciousness in the universe about them. It is abhorrent from all we think and feel, that they should be so: and yet Love might make heavens of them, if they were. 1 Late and soon, "The world is too much with us. |