In this birth and in these natures we seem to find the very similitude of the force of storm-fed torrents and cataracts. Under what guise should men more naturally think of those than under the guise of children of the cloud, made to gallop, leap, and fling themselves like horses, and at the same time to grasp, carry away, and hurl like men? The names correspond, and so do the weapons-the trunks and boulders which the torrent tears up and whirls along in its course. The ordinary river-god of Greek mythology is, we know, a bull with the head of a man, but sometimes with the whole trunk of a man as well, when his figure becomes quite analogous to that of a Centaur, as may be seen on a vase representing the combat of Hercules and Acheloös in the British Museum. And it is of course not less true that the horse, on its part, is also a regular symbol for the motion and power of water, and on that account was fabled to have been created by Poseidon, the god of the sea. And according to Apollodorus, it was no other than the same Poseidon who received to himself, and concealed within the heart of a mountain, the last stragglers among the defeated Centaurs of Arcadia. This interpretation once suggested, we seem to find it unconsciously confirmed by many phrases of the poets, in which the words they use of Centaurs might be transferred back, and applied literally to mountainstreams. Thus Euripides speaks of the Centaurs rushing down from Mount Homolê, their arms filled with pines, to course over the tilled lowlands and lay them waste. And Lucan: "Upon these" (the mountains of Thessaly) "a cloud's pregnant womb poured forth amidst the Pelethronian caves the demi-brutal Centaurs, offspring of Ixion."* And Virgil: "As when a pair of cloud-born Centaurs race down from the heights, from the snows of Homolê or Othrys, the great forest makes way for their going, and its boughs yield with a noise of crashing."+ For "Centaurs" read "floods" or "torrents," and the sense is evidently as good. And this account of the origin of our monsters will be still further confirmed if it is found to fit with an equally appropriate account of their mythical kinsmen and antagonists, the Lapiths. Now this is precisely what we do find. The word Lapitha is akin to both Greek and Latin words, meaning "stone" or "rock," and several verbs denoting obduracy are formed from the same root. The fact that mountain-citadels bearing the name Lapithê, Lapithas, or Lapithai existed in various remote parts of Greece, seems to show that the name is mythic, and not that of any real tribe. Again, of the individual Lapiths, several are proved by their names to stand for personified powers of the forest, wild, and mountain. *Illic semiferos Ixionidas Centauros Feta Pelethroniis nubes effudit in antris.-Lucan. Phars, vi. 386 sqq. † Ceu duo nubigenæ cum vertice montis ab alto Descendunt Centauri, Homolen Othrynque nivalem Linquentes cursu rapido; dat euntibus ingens Silva locum, et magno cedunt virgulta fragore.-Virg. Æn. vii. 647 899. Thus Kaineus, whose name signifies slayer, has a father, Elatos, named from the fir-tree, and a son, Koronos, named probably from a belt or ring of rock; and thus in such names of Lapiths as Dryas, man of the oaks, Hypseus, man of the heights, Charaxos, man of the torrent-clefts, Leonteus, lion-man, Hoplos or Hopleus, man in armour, we realise the cousinhood which exists between the Centaurs and their antagonists; they are beings of a common stock. And once more, when Homer in the Iliad describes the stand made against a terrific rush of Trojan assailants at the gates of the Grecian camp by the two Lapith heroes Leonteus and Polypotês, he describes it in terms which seem to betray an unconscious reminiscence of that which a Lapith originally meant. While all the rest of the Greeks are huddled in rout, these two, stubborn in their strength, stand fast and shrink not, "like oaks mightily rooted in the mountain, which defy the wind and rain day by day.” If the Centaurs, then, are powers of assault, the Lapiths, it seems, are powers of resistance: if the Centaurs are a race of mythic monsters whose violence is the violence of cloud-born flood and cataract, the Lapiths are a race of mythic giants whose stubbornness must be the stubbornness of earth-rooted rock and tree. The conflict between the monsters and the giants, in its primitive sense and meaning, will have been an imaginative version, given by early dwellers in Thessalian hills, of the conflict of torrent-strength against mountain-strength in the stormy fastnesses above their homes. The headlong foe is vanquished, for against cliff and forest the cataracts spend their strength in vain. This physical fable, as it passed through the mouths of successive generations, by degrees acquires both dramatic consistency and ethical significance. Because the floods, although they ravage, fertilise, therefore to the Centaurs or flood-demons is attributed sexual rage. Because the floods are sudden and destructive, therefore the flood-demons are thought of as subject to the freaks of drunkenness; and so to the lust of women in the Centaurs is added the lust of wine. The weapons of branch and boulder, first given them as proper to their physical nature, are retained as characteristic of their savagery in the scale of being; and to make the character complete, the raw diet and the hunter's life are added. It is easy to conceive how the stream of mythic story thus set going would absorb and carry along with it any materials that might be supplied by the actual history of the regions. If there happened real wars between mounted and unmounted tribes, the exploits of the combatants would become merged in those of the typical torrent-cavalry and rock-infantry of the myth. If there happened raids and reivings, harrying of crops and seizing of women by savage mountaineers, their descents would be confounded in story with the descent of the personified mountain-floods. * Τὼ μὲν ἄρα προπαροιθε πυλάων ὑψηλάων ῥίζησιν μεγάλῃσι διηνεκέεσσ' ἀραρυίαι. Π. xii. 131-134. And when the idea of the Centaurs, thus developed, dramatised, and enriched, spread from Thessaly over the rest of Greece, the popular imagination would class them among the other monsters and scourges of primeval days, and would assign a share in their overthrow to the popular heroes by whom such creatures in general were held to have been overthrown-the Athenians, to their own hero Theseus, the Dorians, to the hero both of their race and of all Hellas, Hercules. But how, it may be asked, about Cheiron? Granting your derivation for the wicked Centaurs, how will it serve for the mild and wise one? The answer is, that torrents are not always in flood, nor are mountainstreams all of them rapacious. Sometimes they devastate, at other times they gladden; some descend with damage and terror, others are lifegiving and serviceable. One of the strong points of our derivation is, in truth, that it explains, what had long been regarded as a puzzle, why Cheiron should be of the same monstrous shape as the other Centaurs. He is so shaped because he also is a power or genius of the streams of Pelion. But he personifies those streams in their gentleness, and not in their fury. His name Cheiron is from cheir, " a hand;" so that he is the handy, or useful one; the skill he teaches Jason and Asklepios is the soft-handed skill of medicine; and when his mother is called Phillyra and a Naiad, it is as much as to say that he himself is concerned especially with herbs and waters. The vegetation of Mount Pelion, says Theophrastus, is the most medicinal in Greece; and, in fact, we know that in this mountain-range there were places hallowed in all times of Greek history for their salubrity, and that among the valleys opening out from it, some were famous for yielding herbs of virtue. Here was the very cradle of the art of medicine, the legendary training-ground of Asklepios and his sons. Cheiron, with his leechcraft and his music, with his helpfulness and wisdom, is the incarnation of all the blessings of the land; of its waters when they flow without violence, of the peace of the mountain-recesses whence they issue, of the coolness of the airs about their course, the waving of the leaves above their ripple, and the refreshment of the healing growths they nourish. In the persons of the other Centaurs is expressed the curse of mountain-streams, but their blessing in Cheiron; in them the rudeness of nature's outrages, in him the sweet influences of her benignity; and it is one of the high achievements of the Greek genius that it should have been able to express so aptly, and in symbols that do not allow their affinity to be forgotten, the character of those kindred but contrasted powers. S. COLVIN. • βαθυμῆτα Χείρων τράφε λιθίνῳ Ἰάσον' ἔνδον τέγει, καὶ ἔπειτεν Ασκλήπιον, τὸν φαρμάκων δίδαξε μαλακόχειρα νόμον. Pind. Nem. iii. 53 sgg. Rose Cherril: An Cxile's Love Story. I. "My dear," said Miss Smalway, speaking from the eminence of her desk in the pupil room, "I shall insist upon hearing from Mosier Brun's own lips whether it has been his purpose to trifle with your affections." "But I assure you you are mistaken," pleaded Rose Cherril, whose cheeks were all pink; "Monsieur Brun has never said a word which I could construe "Hush, Rose; you might deceive all the world, but you cannot deceive me," interrupted Miss Smalway severely. "Will you look me in the face and assert that this unprincipled Frenchman "I do not believe he is unprincipled," muttered Rose. "You are evading the question, miss. Will you look me in the face and affirm that it would not signify an atom to you if you never saw Mosier Brun again?" It was a very pretty face which the junior governess of Acacia House turned up towards her employer. There was candour in it, and sweetness; but now the clear blue eyes were dim, the little lips which never told untruths quivered, and Rose suddenly burst into tears. She could not imagine how Miss Smalway had discovered a secret which she scarcely confessed to herself. The French master and she were very good friends, but what had that to do with love? Was it love to be civil to a man, to admire his talents, and-to cry thus because one was accused of caring for him? Miss Smalway triumphed in her perspicacity, and, as she watched the weeping governess, shook her head and remarked that it was just what she had foreseen all along. It was Miss Smalway's habit to foresee things, and Rose, having lived a year under her roof, ought to have been aware by this time that nothing could escape the prying of two eyes searching as telescopes. Miss Smalway was a lean and middleaged person, who ruled her establishment of forty pupils with kindness, but could not bear that anything relating to them or other members of her household should be concealed from her. She was very short and sharp with pupils who neglected to show her the letters they wrote, or received from home. She stole about the passages at night in list slippers to overhear conversations in the dormitories; she spied upon her governesses, who durst not leave the keys of their desks trailing about lest she should overhaul their private papers; and she taught her housemaids to be sad fibbers by questioning them as to their flirtations with the baker's man and the pot-boy. In all this Miss Smalway professed to act in the lofty interests of morality, but the one good thing about her was that she never turned the secrets which she had unearthed to an ungenerous advantage. "I don't see why you should not marry Mosier Brun if you like him," she observed after a moment's reflective pause. "Don't cry like that, child." "Oh, but I'm not half good enough for him," wailed Rose, who was still crying. "Not good enough! You, the daughter of an English clergyman, not good enough for a trumpery French refugee! Why, if he were to return to his country they would cut off that curly head of his and put it in a sawdust basket. It's as well that you should face this question in the proper light, Rose Cherril; for you are a pretty English girl, bred in a Christian land, and if you consent to marry a foreign pagan the favour will be all on your side.” It was soothing to Rose Cherril to be assured that she was a pretty girl, but she did not like to hear Paul Brun described as a pagan, "I do not know why he has been exiled," she said, "but I have never heard a word from him that was not becoming." "Oh, of course he is soft-spoken enough," said Miss Smalway, shaking her head, "but he will have to give me something more than fair words when I question him to-day." "But, indeed, I would much rather you did not question him," repeated Rose ruefully. "He may think I prompted you, which would be dreadful. I would not for worlds let him imagine-" "Not a word more, for my determination is inexorable," said Miss Smalway as she closed the ledger in which she had been making up her pupils' half-year's accounts. "It is three o'clock now, and time to ring the class bell. In a few minutes the Mosier will be here, and then I will ascertain his mind or he shall have a piece of mine." Saying this, Miss Smalway nodded her wizen head very resolutely, and Rose Cherril, drying her eyes with a sigh, went out to ring the bell that summoned forty young ladies from the playground to afternoon lessons. After this she ran up to her own room to bathe her eyes in water, in order that the pupils might not see she had been crying. It was close upon the end of the summer school term at Acacia House, Richmond, and the last drawing and music lessons were to be given on that day. The girls came trooping in from their games of croquet and battledore under the tall trees of the recreation ground, which was a very park, with plats of lawn for those who liked to romp, and shady bypaths for those who preferred to saunter, gossiping. They were a fresh and healthy bevy of girls, whose giggling filled the hall as they hung up their straw hats on the pegs, threw down their mallets and shuttlecocks, and smoothed their hair with the palms of their hands. Some of them were tall marriageable maidens, whose school days were |