354 HISTORY OF GREECE emotions, furnished to him at the same time a quasi-history an 3 quasi-philosophy : they filled up the vacuum of the unrecorded past, and explained many of the puzzling incognita of the pres- ent. 1 Nor need we wonder that the same plausibility which cap- thcsc early mythes is " impossibility accredited as truth," " che la di lei pro- pria materia c /' impossibile credibile" ("p. 176, and still more fully in the first redaction of the Scienza Nuova, b.iii. c. 4 ; vol. iv. p. 187 of his Works). When we read the Canones Myt/toloyici of Vico (De Constantia Philologirc, Pars Posterior, c. xxx. ; vol. iii. p. 363), and his explanation of the legends of the Olympic gods, Hercules, Theseus, Kadmus, etc., wo see clearly that the meaning which he professes to bring out is one previously put in by himself. There arc some just remarks to the same purpose in Karl Rittcr's Vor- halle Europflischer Volker Geschichten, Abschn. ii. p. 150 seq. (Berlin, 1820^) He too points out how much the faith of the old world (der Glaube der Vor- welt) has become foreign to our minds, since the recent advances of "Politik und Kritik," and how impossible it is for us to elicit history from their con- ceptions by our analysis, in cases where they have not distinctly laid it out for us. The great length of this note prevents me from citing the passage : and he seems to me also (like Vico) to pursue his own particular investiga- tions in forgetfulness of the principle laid down by himself. 1 0. Muller, in his Prolegomena zu einer wissenschafdicften Mythologie (cap. iv. p. 108), has pointed out the mistake of supposing that there existed ori- ginally some nucleus of pure reality as the starting-point of the mythes, and that upon this nucleus fiction was superinduced afterwards : he maintains that the real and the ideal were blended together in the primitive conception of the mythes. Respecting the general state of mind out of which the mythes grew, see especially pages 78 and 1 10 of that work, which is everywhere full of instruction on the subject of the Grecian mythes, and is eminently sug- gestive, even where the positions of the author are not completely made out The short Heldensage der Gricchen by Nitzsch (Kiel, 1842, t. v.) contains more of just and original thought on the subject of the Grecian mythes than any work with which I am acquainted. I embrace completely the subjective point of view in which he regards them ; and although I have profited much from reading his short tract, I may mention that before I ever saw it, I had enforced the same reasonings on the subject in an article in the Westminster Review, May 1843, on the Heroen- Geschichten of Niebuhr. Jacob Grimm, in the preface to his Deutsche Myilioloyie p. 1, 1st edit. Gott. 1835), pointedly insists on the distinction between " Sage " and history, as well as upon the fact that the former has its chief root in religious belief " Legend and history (he says) are powers each by itself, adjoining indeed on *he confines, but having each its own separate and exclusive ground , " als3 p. xxvii. of the same introduction. A view substantially similar is adopted by William Grimm, the other of the two distinguished brothers whose labors have so much elucidated Tea
