STATE OF SOCIETY, ETC. IN LEGENDARY GREECE. 57 believing particular incidents ol a supposed past, without any attempt to graduate the line of connection between them and himself: to introduce fictitious hypotheses and media of connec- tion is the business of a succeeding age, when the stimulus of rational curiosity is first felt, without any authentic materials to supply it. We have, then, the form of history operating upon the matter of legend, the transition-state between legend and history ; less interesting, indeed, than either separately, yet nec- essary as a step between the two. CHAPTER XX. STATE OF SOCIETY AND MANNERS AS EXHIBITED IN GRECIAN LEGEND. THOUGH the particular persons and events, chronicled in the legendary poems of Greece, are not to be regarded as belonging to the province of real history, those poems are, nevertheless, full of instruction as pictures of life and manners ; and the very same circumstances, which divest their composers of all credibility as historians, render them so much the more valuable as unconscious expositors of their own contemporary society. While professedly describing an uncertified past, their combinations are involuntarily borrowed from the surrounding present : for among communities, such as those of the primitive Greeks, without books, without means of extended travel, without acquaintance with foreign lan- guages and habits, the imagination, even of highly gifted men, was naturally enslaved by the circumstances around them to a far greater degree than in the later days of Sol6n or Herodotus ; insomuch that the characters which they conceived and the scenes which they described would for that reason bear a stronger generic resemblance to the realities of their own time and locality. Nor was the poetry of that age addressed to lettered and critical authors, watchful to detect plagiarism, sated with 3*
