LEGENDS OF THE SAINTS. 47J the gradual formation: of critical and philosophical habits in the modern mind, have caused these legends of the Saints, once stammcnt le pueril au grand : il faut 1'avouer, elle defigure parfois un peu ces homines d'une trempe si forte, en mettant sur leur compte des anecdotes dont le caractere n'est pas toujours se'rieux ; elle en a use ainsi pour St. Columban, dont nous verrons tout a 1'heure le role vis-a-vis de Brunehaut et des chefs Merovingiens. La le'gende auroit pu so dispenser de nous apprendre, comment un jour, il se fit rapporter par un corbeau les ganta qu'il avait perdus : comment, un autre jour, il empecha la biere de couler d'un tonneau perce, et diverses merveilles, certainement indignes de sa memoire." The miracle by which St. Columban employed the raven to fetch back his lost gloves, is exactly in the character of the Homeric and Hesiodic age : the earnest faith, as well as the reverential sympathy, between the Homeric man and Zeus or Athene, is indicated by the invocation of their aid for nm own sufferings of detail, and in his own need and danger. The criticism of M. Ampere, on the other hand, is analogous to that of the later pagans, after the conception of a course of nature had become established in men's minds, so far as that exceptional interference by the gods was understood to be, comparatively speaking, rare, and only supposable upon what were called great emergences. In the old Hesiodic legend (see above, ch. ix. p. 245}, Apollo is apprized by a raven of the infidelity of the nymph Koronis to him TU [lev up uyye- 3of Tj7.de Kopa^, etc. (the raven appears elsewhere as companion of Apollo, Plutarch, de Isid. et Os. p. 379, Herod, iv. 15.) Pindar, in his version of th legend, eliminated the raven, without specifying how Apollo got his knowl edge of the circumstance. The Scholiasts praise Pindar much for having rejected the puerile version of the story l-iraivel rbv Hivdapov 6 'Aprfpuv OTL TtapaKpovaufievoc TTJV Trepl rbv Kooaxa IttTOpiav, avrbv <5i' iavrov h/vune- vai (pijai rbv 'A.irc/A?M xaipstv ovv iuaag r> TOIOVTU /ivdp r i /I e u (, OVT i TiTj p u6 e i, etc. compare also the criticisms of the Schol. ad Soph. CEdip. Kol. 1378, on the old epic ThcbaYs ; and the remarks of Arrian (Exp. Al. iii. 4) on the divine interference by which Alexander and his army were enabled to find their way across the sand of the desert to the temple of Ammon. In the eyes of M. Ampere, the recital of the biographer of St. Columban appears puerile (ov-u I6ov uSe tieovf uvu<j>av6a QifavvTaf, Odyss. iii. 221); in the eyes of that biographer, the criticism of M. Ampere would have ap- peared impious. When it is once conceded that phenomena are distributa ble under two denominations, the natural and the miraculous, it must be left to the feelings of each individual to determine what is and what is not, a suitable occasion for a miracle. Diodorus and Pausanias differed in opinion (as stated in a previous chapter) about the death of Actaeon by his own bounds, the former maintaining that the case was one fit for the speciaj intervention of the goddess Artemis; the latter, that it was not so. Th
