main it was true, and the case of Pindar may serve to illustrate it. Nor can we with much confidence attempt to recover from the works of Pindar such an autobiography, all the more valuable because undesigned, as the ingenuity of modern critics has elicited from the fragments of Theognis. Of the scenes and places which he pictures in such vivid colours, we know not which he had seen in the flesh and which with the eye of imagination. If he describes himself as "guiding the bark of song" to Rhodes, or "shipping a cargo" of encomium for Sicily, or leading the revels "round Hiero's hospitable board,"—these descriptions may indeed be the poetical record of veritable travels, but we can never be sure that the apparent kernel of fact is, in truth, more solid, less ideal, than the imagery which invests it. A consistent Euhemeristic interpretation of a poet's allusions to his own movements would often lead us to strange results. Not every modern bard who tells us of his "slumbers on Parnassus' brow" can be inferred to have trod in fact the soil of Greece. Future biographers of the present Poet-Laureate will scarcely record for posterity, on the evidence of his own early poems, his marriage with "the gardener's daughter," or his visit to "Bagdat's shrines of fretted gold" "in the golden prime of good Haroun Alraschid."
Practically, then, our evidence for the facts of Pindar's life consists of four biographies, compiled fully fourteen hundred years after the poet's death, and forming the latest links in a chain of tradition which cannot be traced beyond the school of Aristotle. It is
