doubt that Mr. Bright's audacity (so far as that
endowment might avail) had enabled him to
take full advantage of whatever capabilities they
offered. Yet, in spite of my experience of his
free way of handling them, I did not quite see,
I confess, how he could have obviated all the
difficulties in the way of rendering them pre-
sentable to children. These old legends, so
brimming over with every thing that is most
abhorrent to our Christianized moral sense
some of them so hideous, others so melancholy
and miserable, amid which the Greek tragedians
sought their themes, and moulded them into
the sternest forms of grief that ever the world
saw; was such material the stuff that children's
playthings should be made of! How were they
to be purified! How was the blessed sunshine
to be thrown into them!

But Eustace told me that these myths were
the most singular things in the world, and that
he was invariably astonished, whenever he be-
gan to relate one, by the readiness with which
it adapted itself to the childish purity of his au-
ditors. The objectionable characteristics seem
to te a parasitical growth, having no essentiaJ

[[13]]

p012 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p013w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p014

v?