They on their part being by nature cruel and by their former fortune exasperated, and knowing well enough what they are wanted for, apply themselves to this kind of work with wonderful diligence; till for want of caution and from over eagerness to ingratiate themselves, they at one time or another (taking a nod or an ambiguous word of the prince for a warrant) perpetrate some execution that is odious and unpopular. Upon which the prince, not willing to take the envy of it upon himself, and well knowing that he can always have plenty of such instruments, throws them overboard, and leaves them to the course of law and the vengeance of the friends and relatives of their victims, and to popular hatred ; and so amid much applause of the people and great acclamations and blessings on the king, they meet at last, though late, the fate they deserve.

IV.
NARCISSUS ;

OR SELF-LOVE.

NARCISSUS is said to have been a young man of wonderful beauty, but intolerably proud, fastidious, and disdainful. Pleased with himself and despising all others, he led a solitary life in the woods and hunting-grounds; with a few companions to whom he was all in all; followed also whenever he went by a nymph called Echo. Living thus, he came by chance one day to a clear fountain, and (being in the heat of noon) lay down by it; when beholding in the water his own image, he fell into such a study and then into such a rapturous admiration of himself, that he could not be drawn away from gazing at the shadowy picture, but remained rooted to the spot till sense left him ; and at last he was changed into the flower that bears his name; a flower which appears in the early spring; and is sacred to the infernal deities,—Pluto, Proserpine, and the Furies.

In this fable are represented the dispositions, and the fortunes too, of those persons who from consciousness either of beauty or some other gift with which nature unaided by any industry of their own has graced them, fali in love as it were with themselves. For with this state of mind there is commonly joined an indisposition to appear much in public or engage in business; because business would expose them to many neglects and scorns, by which their minds would be dejected and troubled. Therefore they commonly live a solitary, private, and shadowed life; with a small circle of chosen companions, all devoted admirers, who assent like an echo to everything they say, and entertain them with mouth-homage; till being by such habits gradually depraved and puffed up, and besotted at last with self-admiration, they fall into such a sloth and listlessness that they grow utterly stupid, and lose all vigour and alacrity. And it was a beautiful thought to choose the flower of spring as an emblem of characters like this characters which in the opening of their career flourish and are talked of, but disappoint in maturity the promise of their youth. The fact too that this flower is sacred to the infernal deities contains an allusion to the same thing. For men of this disposition turn out utterly useless and good for nothing whatever; and anything that yields no fruit, but like the way of a ship in the sea passes and leaves no trace, was by the ancients held sacred to the shades and infernal gods.

V.
STYX;

OR TREATIES.

It is a very common tradition that of the one oath by which the gods bound themselves when they meant to leave no room for repentance; and finds a place in a great many fables. In that case they invoked in witness, not any majesty of heaven or any divine attribute, but Styx ; a river in the infernal regions which with many windings encircled the palace of Dis. This form of oath alone, and no other, was held to be sure and inviolable: the penalty of breaking it being one which the deities most dreaded, -namely that the breaker should for a certain period of years be excluded from the banquets of the gods.

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The fable seems to have been invented in allusion to treaties and compacts of princes: in respect of which it is but too true that whatever be the solemnity and sanctity of the oath they are confirmed with, yet they are little to be depended on's on; insomuch that they are used in fact rather with an eye to reputation and fame and ceremony, than for confidence and security and effect. And even when the ties of relationship (which are as the sacraments of nature) or of mutual good services come in to aid, yet in most cases all are too weak for ambition and interest and the licence of power: the rather because princes can always find plenty of plausible pretexts (not being accountable to any arbiter) wherewith to justify and veil their cupidity and bad faith. There is adopted therefore but one true and proper pledge of faith; and it is not any celestial divinity. This is Necessity (the great god of the powerful), and peril of state, and communion of interest. Now Necessity is elegantly represented under the figure of Styx; the fatal river across which no man can return. This is the deity which Iphicrates the Athenian invoked to witness treaties; and since he was one that spoke out plainly what most men think and keep to themselves, his words are worth quoting. Finding that the Lacedæmonians were devising and propounding various cautions and sanctions and securities and bonds to hold the treaty fast, There is only one bond and security (said he, interrupting them) that can hold between you and us:-you must prove that you have yielded so much into our hands that you cannot hurt us if you would. And so it is that if the means of hurting be taken away, or if a breach of the treaty would endanger the existence or the integrity of the state and revenue,—then the treaty may be considered to be ratified and sanctioned and confirmed as by the oath of Styx: for then it is upon peril of being interdicted from the banquets of the gods; which was the ancient expression for the rights and prerogatives of empire, and wealth, and felicity.

VI.
PAN;

OR NATURE 4.

THE ancients have given under the person of Pan an elaborate description of
universal nature. His parentage they leave in doubt. Some call him the son
of Mercury; others assign him an origin altogether different; saying that he was
the offspring of a promiscuous intercourse between Penelope and all her suitors.
But in this the name of Penelope has doubtless been foisted by some later author
into the original fable. For it is no uncommon thing to find the more ancient
narrations transferred to persons and names of later date; sometimes absurdly
and stupidly, as in this instance; for Pan was one of the oldest gods, and long
before the times of Ulysses; and Penelope was for her matronly chastity held
in veneration by antiquity. But there is yet a third account of his birth, which
must not be passed over; for some have called him the son of Jupiter and Hybris,
or Insolence.

Whatever was his origin, the Fates are said to have been his sisters.

His person is described by ancient tradition as follows: With horns, and the tops of the horns reaching heaven; his whole body shaggy and hairy; his beard especially long. In figure, biform; human in the upper parts, the other half brute; ending in the feet of a goat. As emblems of his power he carried in his left hand a pipe compact of seven reeds, in his right a sheep hook or staff crooked at the top; and he was clothed in a scarf, made of panther's skin. The powers and offices assigned to him are these, he is the god of hunters, of shepherds, and generally of dwellers in the country: also he presides over mountains; and is (next to Mercury) the messenger of the gods. He was accounted moreover the captain and commander of the nymphs, who were always dancing and frisking about him: the Satyrs, and their elders, the Sileni, were also of his company. He had the power likewise of exciting sudden terrors,-empty and superstitious ones especially ;-thence called Panics. The actions that are recorded of him are not many; the principal is that he challenged Cupid to wrestle; and was

4 For an enlarged version of this fable see above, pp. 442-447.

beaten by him. He also entangled and caught the giant Typhon in a net; and they say besides, that when Ceres, out of grief and indignation at the rape of Proserpina, had hid herself, and all the gods were earnestly engaged in seeking her out, and had dispersed several ways in search of her, it was Pan's good fortune to light upon and discover her by accident while he was hunting. He had also the presumption to match himself against Apollo in music; and was by Midas's judgment pronounced victor; for which judgment Midas had to wear the ears of an ass, but not so as to be seen. There are no amours reported of Pan, or at least very few: which among a crowd of gods so excessively amorous may seem strange. The only thing imputed to him in this kind is a passion for Echo, who was also accounted his wife; and for one nymph called Syringa, with love of whom he was smitten by Cupid in anger and revenge because of his presumption in challenging him to wrestle. Nor had he any issue (which is again strange, seeing that the gods, especially the males, were remarkably prolific) except one daughter, a little serving woman called lambe, who used to amuse guests with ridiculous stories, and was supposed by some to be Pan's offspring by his wife Echo.

A noble fable this, if there be any such; and big almost to bursting with the secrets and mysteries of Nature.

Pan, as the very word declares, represents the universal frame of things, or Nature. About his origin there are and can be but two opinions; for Nature is either the offspring of Mercury-that is of the Divine Word (an opinion which the Scriptures establish beyond question, and which was entertained by all the more divine philosophers); or else of the seeds of things mixed and confused together. For they who derive all things from a single principle, either take that principle to be God, or if they hold it to be a material principle, assert it to be though actually one yet potentially many; so that all difference of opinion on this point is reducible to one or other of these two heads,-the world is sprung either from Mercury, or from all the suitors. He sang, says Virgil,

How through the void of space the seeds of things
Came first together; sceds of the sea, land, air,
And the clear fire; how from these elements
All embryos grew, and the great world itself
Swelled by degrees and gathered in its globe.

The third account of the generation of Pan, might make one think that the Greeks had heard something, whether through the Egyptians or otherwise, concerning the Hebrew mysteries; for it applies to the state of the world, not at its very birth, but as it was after the fall of Adam, subject to death and corruption. For that state was the offspring of God and Sin,-and so remains. So that all three stories of the birth of Pan (if they be understood with a proper distinction as to facts and times) may be accepted as indeed true. For true it is that this Pan, whom we behold and contemplate and worship only too much, is sprung from the Divine Word, through the medium of confused matter (which is itself God's creature), and with the help of sin and corruption entering in.

To the Nature of things, the Fates or destinies of things are truly represented as sisters. For natural causes are the chain which draws after it the births and durations and deaths of all things; their fallings and risings, their labours and felicities:-in short all the fates that can befall them.

That the world is represented with horns, and that such horns are broad at bottom and narrow at top, has relation to the fact that the whole frame of nature rises to a point like a pyramid. For individuals are infinite: these are collected into species, which are themselves also very numerous; the species are gathered up into genera, and these again into genera of a higher stage; till nature, contracting as it rises, seems to meet at last in one point. Nor need we wonder that Pan's horns touch heaven; since the summits, or universal forms, of nature do in a manner reach up to God; the passage from metaphysic to natural theology being ready and short.

The body of Nature is most elegantly and truly represented as covered with

hair; in allusion to the rays which all objects emit; for rays are like the hairs or bristles of nature; and there is scarcely anything which is not more or less ra diant. This is very plainly seen in the power of vision, and not less so in all kinds of magnetic virtue, and in every effect which takes place at a distance. For whatever produces an effect at a distance may be truly said to emit rays. But Pan's hair is longest in the beard, because the rays of the celestial bodies operate and penetrate from a greater distance than any other; and we see also that the sun, when the upper part of him is veiled by a cloud and the rays break out below, has the appearance of a face with a beard.

Again, the body of Nature is most truly described as biform; on account of the difference between the bodies of the upper and the lower world. For the upper or heavenly bodies are for their beauty and the equability and constancy of their motion, as well as for the influence they have upon earth and all that belongs to it, fitly represented under the human figure: but the others, by reason of their perturbations and irregular motions, and because they are under the influence of the celestial bodies, may be content with the figure of a brute. The same description of Nature's body may be referred also to the mixture of one species with another. For there is no nature which can be regarded as simple ; every one seeming to participate and be compounded of two. Man has something of the brute; the brute has something of the vegetable; the vegetable something of the inanimate body; and so all things are in truth biformed and made up of a higher species and a lower. There is also a very ingenious allegory involved in that attribute of the goat's feet; which has reference to the motion upwards of terrestrial bodies towards the regions of air and sky: for the goat is a climbing animal, and loves to hang from rocks and cling to the sides of precipices : a tendency which is also exhibited in a wonderful manner by substances that belong properly to the lower world--witness clouds and meteors.

The emblems in Pan's hands are of two kinds—one of harmony, the other of empire. The pipe compact of seven reeds evidently indicates that harmony and concent of things, that concord mixed with discord, which results from the motions of the seven planets. Also the sheep-hook is a noble metaphor, alluding to the mixture of straight and crooked in the ways of nature. But the staff is curved chiefly towards the top; because all the works of Divine Providence in the world are wrought by winding and roundabout ways-where one thing seems to be doing, and another is doing really-as in the selling of Joseph into Egypt, and the like. So also in all the wiser kinds of human government, they who sit at the helm can introduce and insinuate what they desire for the good of the people more successfully by pretexts and indirect ways than directly; so that every rod or staff of empire is truly crooked at the top. The scarf or mantle of Pan is very ingeniously feigned to be made of a panther's skin; on account of the spots scattered all over it. For the heavens are spotted with stars, the sea with islands, the earth with flowers; and even particular objects are generally variegated on the surface, which is as it were their mantle or scarf.

Now the office of Pan can in no way be more lively set forth and explained than by calling him god of hunters. For every natural action, every motion and process of nature, is nothing else than a hunt. For the sciences and arts hunt after their works, human counsels hunt after their ends, and all things in nature hunt either after their food, which is like hunting for prey, or after their pleasures, which is like hunting for recreation;-and that too by methods skilful and sagacious.

After the wolf the lion steals; the wolf the kid doth follow;
The kid pursues the cytisus o'er hillock and thro' hollow.

Also Pan is the god of country people in general; because they live more according to nature; whereas in courts and cities nature is corrupted by too much culture; til it is true what the poet said of his mistress,-the girl herself is the least part of the matter.

Pan is likewise especially called president of mountains-because it is in mountains and elevated places that the nature of things is most spread abroad, and lies most open to vie and study. As for Pan's being, next to Mercury, the

messenger of the gods, that is an allegory plainly divine; seeing that next to the Word of God, the image itself of the world is the great proclaimer of the divine wisdom and goodness. So sings the Psalmist : The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament sheweth his handiwork.

Again, Pan takes delight in the nymphs; that is the souls; for the souls of the living are the delight of the world. And Pan is truly called their commander, since they follow the guidance each of her several nature; leaping and dancing about it with infinite variety, every one in her country's fashion, and with motion that never ceases. And in their company are ever found the Satyrs and the Sileni; that is old age and youth; for all things have their merry and dancing time, and likewise their heavy and tippling time. And yet to one who truly considers them, the pursuits of either age appear perhaps, as they did to Democritus, ridiculous and deformed, like to a Satyr or Silenus.

In the Panic terrors there is set forth a very wise doctrine; for by the nature of things all living creatures are endued with a certain fear and dread, the office of which is to preserve their life and essence, and to avoid or repel approaching mischief. But the same nature knows not how to keep just measure-but together with salutary fears ever mingles vain and empty ones; insomuch that all things (if one could see into the heart of them) are quite full of Panic terrors; human things most of all; so infinitely tossed and troubled as they are with superstition (which is in truth nothing but a Panic terror), especially in seasons of hardship, anxiety, and adversity.

With regard to the audacity of Pan in challenging Cupid to fight, it refers to this, that matter is not without a certain inclination and appetite to dissolve the world and fall back into the ancient chaos; but that the overswaying concord of things (which is represented by Cupid or Love) restrains its will and effort in that direction and reduces it to order. And therefore it is well for man and for the world that in that contest Pan was foiled. The same thing is alluded to in that other circumstance of the catching of Typhon in a net: because however it be that vast and strange swellings (for that is the meaning of Typhon) take place occasionally in nature-whether of the sea, or the clouds, or the earth, or any other body-nevertheless all such exuberancies and irregularities are by the nature of things caught and confined in an inextricable net, and bound down as with a chain of adamant.

As for the tale that the discovery of Ceres was reserved for this god, and that while he was hunting, and denied to the rest of the gods though diligently and specially engaged in seeking her; it contains a very true and wise admonition— namely that the discovery of things useful to life and the furniture of life, such as corn, is not to be looked for from the abstract philosophies, as it were the greater gods, no not though they devote their whole powers to that special endbut only from Pan; that is from sagacious experience and the universal knowledge of nature, which will often by a kind of accident, and as it were while engaged in hunting, stumble upon such discoveries.

Then again that match in music and the result of it exhibits a wholesome doctrine, fit to restrain and reduce to sobriety the pride and overweening confidence of human reason and judgment. For it seems there are two kinds of harmony and music; one of divine providence, the other of human reason; and to the human judgment, and the ears as it were of mortals, the government of the world and nature, and the more secret judgments of God, sound somewhat harsh and untunable; and though this be ignorance, such as deserves to be distinguished with the ears of an ass, yet those ears are worn secretly and not in the face of the world-for it is not a thing observed or noted as a deformity by the vulgar. Lastly, it is not to be wondered at that no amours are attributed to Pan, except his marriage with Echo. For the world enjoys itself and in itself all things that Now he that is in love wants something, and where there is abundance of everything want can have no place. The world therefore can have no loves, nor any want (being content with itself) unless it be of discourse. Such is the nymph Echo, or, if it be of the more exact and measured kind, Syringa. And it is excellently provided that of all discourses or voices Echo alone should be chosen for the world's wife. For that is in fact the true philosophy which echoes

are.