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people, who have never suspected that there is any connection between the several parts of nature, and that a general mechanism can produce so many different phænomena. Accordingly, all barbarous nations have ever substituted, instead of the simple and uniform laws of nature which were unknown to them, the operation of spirits, genii and divinities of all kinds, and have given them as assistants to the supreme Being in the moral and physical government of the world. If they have paid to any of them greater honours than to others, it has usually been to those whose dominion extended over such things as were most dear to them, or appeared most worthy of admiration. This was what happened in Scandinavia. In process of time that supreme Being, the idea of whom takes in all existence, was restrained to one particular province, and passed among the generality of the inhabitants for the God of war. No object, in their opinion, could be more worthy his attention, nor more proper to shew forth his power. Hence those frightful pictures which are left us of him in the Icelandic Mythology[1], where he is always meant under the name of Odin. He is there called “The terrible and severe God; the
- ↑ See the Edda, Mythol. 3. & seq.
