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rean romance of this writer we learn, that Abaris had procured it in the temple of the Hyperborean Apollo; and that in addition to the services it had rendered him in his several journeys "by flood and field," it had assisted him in performing lustrations, expelling pestilences, and allaying the fury of the winds. The place of its deposit clearly shows it to have been the same miraculous weapon employed by the Delian god in destroying the Cyclops; for another authority informs us, he buried this fatal dart in an Hyperborean mountain, and that when banished from Olympus, it was daily borne to him on the winds, laden with all the fruits of the season". In this latter attribute it becomes identified with the horn of Amalthæa, and serves to explain the mystery overlooked by Jamblichus, how Abaris, like another Epimenides, might devote his time to the service of the gods, and yet never be seen to eat or drink. In the traditions of Wales, this dart has been accommodated to the more stately fashions of later times; and one of the thirteen marvellous productions of Britain is the car of Morgan, which carried the possessor to whatever district he desired. But here again we have only another form for the talaria of the Nymphs, with which Perseus winged his way to the residence of Medusa; or the ring in the German tale, The King of the Golden Mountain,—while in the popular story of Fortunatus it assumes the humbler guise of a wishing-cap, and in the relations of the Kurds, and the history of Tom Thumb, it has descended to the lowly shape of a pair of seven-leagued boots. Another object enumerated among the thirteen marvellous productions of Britain, is the veil or mask of Arthur, which had the power of rendering the wearer's person invisible, without interrupting his view of the things around him. In other fables of the same country, this property is also given to the ring of Eluned, the Lunet of the old English romance

97

Jamblichus, Vit. Pythag. c. 19. 28.
Hyginus, Astron. c. 15.

98 Mr. Jones calls Eluned the lover of Owain; which if correct, would justify

of Ywaine and Gawaine: and in several German tales the hero is made to conceal himself from the "ken" of his companions by the assistance of an enchanted cloak. The romance of king Laurin, and the far-famed Nibelungen-lied, follow the general traditions of the North, which confine this mysterious attribute to a nebel-kappe, or fog-cap. But however varied the objects to which this quality has been assigned, we cannot fail to recognise the same common property which distinguished the helm of Pluto, worn by Perseus in his combat with Medusa, or the equally notorious ring of Gyges, whose history has been recorded by Plato". Without detaining the reader to trace the lyre of Hellenic fable through the hands of its several possessors, from Mercury to Amphion

Dictus et Amphion, Thebanæ conditor arcis
Saxa movere sono testudinis, et prece blanda
Ducere quo vellet-

HOR. Ar. Poet. v. 393.

we may proceed to remark, that the earliest notice of its occurrence in Northern fiction is to be found in the mytho logy of Finland. Waïnämöinen, the supreme god of the Finnish Olympus, was the inventor of a stringed instrument called the kandele, which, resembling a kit in its construction, is still played as a guitar. "When this beneficent deity presented the result of his labours to mankind, no mortal hand possessed the skill to awake its harmonies, till the god himself

a conclusion, that the Welsh and English romances follow a different tradition. In the Heldenbuch this ring is given to Otnit by his mother. Weber, p. 49.

De Repub. iii. p. 359. Plato has most vexatiously dismissed a part of the history of this ring with a za.... ἄλλα rs in a pulodoyous, little thinking that the modern antiquary would have been more beholden to him for information on this head, than for all the subtleties of the Cratylus, or the speculations of

the Parmenides. Eucrates, in Lucian's Philopseudes, unblushingly affirms that he had one of these rings in his possession, and had used it on a very trying occasion. The ancients explained the helm of Pluto to be an impervious cloud surrounding the person of the wearer (such no doubt as is described in the Little Garden of Roses): but the passage in which this illustration is given, cannot be more specifically referred to than by citing the Scholia to Pluto published by Rühnken.

touching the strings, and accompanying its notes with his voice, caused the birds in the air, the beasts of the field, and the fishes of the sea to listen attentively to the strain, and even Wäinämöinen was moved to tears, which fell like pearls adown his robe 100." This account, which is literally copied from Finnish tradition, will lose nothing by a comparison with the Grecian fable of Orpheus, and will recall to the reader's memory the celebrated gem representing Pan, the Grecian Wainämöinen, playing upon his pipe in the centre of the ecliptic. The fictions of our own country, or more correctly speaking those of Scotland and Wales, have substituted the harp, as a more decidedly national instrument, for the lyre and kandele, and bestowed it upon two native musicians, Glaskyrion and Glenkindie, if indeed we are justified in separating these persons 101 The former is the hero of a well-known ballad in Dr. Percy's Reliques, (vol. iii. p. 84,) and is placed by Chaucer in the same rank of eminence with the son of Calliope:

There herde I play on a harpe,
That sowned both well and sharpe,
Hym Orpheus full craftily;
And on this side fast by,

100 Mone's continuation of Creutzer, i. p. 54. But this tradition appears to have found its way into Scotland. In a singular composition, published by Sir Walter Scott, "An Interlude on the laying of a Gaist," we find the following allusion to it:

And sune mareit the gaist the fle,
And cround him king of Kandelie;
And they gat them betwene,
Orpheus king and Elpha quene.

Minstrelsy, vol. i. p. 164.

Mr. Jamieson seems to consider Glenkindie a corruption of some local name, which has been substituted for Glakyrion. There can be no doubt but the ballad published by him, as well as that in Dr. Percy's collection, refers to

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the same personage; but who this cele-
brated harper may have been, whether a
native of Wales, Scotland, or any other
country, is not so clear.
The same ra-
tionale will also apply to the name.-It is
to be regretted that a gentleman so emi-
nently qualified as Mr. Jamieson to illu-
strate the popular antiquities of his native
country, should have abandoned a career
in which he has already attained so much
distinction, and might have acquired
still greater. His name must ever be
held in estimation by the friends of
Warton's fame, for the spirited manner
in which he shook off the trammels of
the Ritsonian school, in his first publi-
cation, and vindicated the tasteful la-
bours of Warton and Dr. Percy.

Sate the harper Orion (Amphion?)
And Eacides, Chirion,

And other harpers many one,

And the Briton Glaskyrion.

House of Fame.

The powers of Glenkindie's harp exceed all that has been said of its rival instruments:

He'd harpit a fish out o saut water,

Or water out o' a stane,

Or milk out o' a maiden's breast,

That bairn had never nane 102.

From hence the transition to the horn of Oberon, "which if softly sounded would make every one dance who was not of an irreproachable character;" or the harp of Sigurd 103, which caused inanimate objects to caper in the wildest confusion, was but an easy step. In popular story the same qualities have been conferred upon the fiddle of the German tale The Jew in the Bush, and the pipe of Jack in The mery Geste of the Frere and the Boye, and have thus developed the 1 opposite and contrasting elements contained in this as in every other fable, and without which no mythos seems to be complete.

A still more favourite ornament of popular fiction is the highly-gifted object, of whatever form or name, which is to supply the fortunate owner with the gratification of some particular wish, or to furnish him with the golden means of satisfying every want. In British fable this property has been given to the dish or napkin of Rhydderch the Scholar, which like the table, or table-cloth, introduced into a variety of German tales, no sooner received its master's commands, than it became

p. 93.

102 Jamieson's Scottish Ballads, vol. i. have had much the same effect upon their respective flocks. See pp. 25. 111. 112. (ed. Villoison.) The pipe of Pan, in the same romance, equals any thing recorded of its modern parallels.

103 Herraud of Bosa's Saga, p. 49-51. The pipes of Dorco and Daphnis, in the pastoral romance of Longus, seem to

covered with a sumptuous banquet. The counterpart of Rhydderch's dish is to be found in another British marvel, the horn of Bran, which spontaneously produced whatever liquor was called for and a repetition of the same idea occurs in the goblet given by Oberon to Huon of Bourdeaux, which in the hands of a good man became filled with the most costly wine. In Fortunatus, and those tales which are either imitations of his adventures or copied from a common original, an inexhaustible purse is made to meet the demands of every occasion; while in others a bird, a tree, and even the human person, are made to generate in the same miraculous manner a daily provision of gold 104. A modification of the same idea is also found in the basket of Gwyddno, which no sooner received a deposit of food for one, than the gift became multiplied into a supply for a hundred; or in those stories where the charity bestowed upon the houseless wanderer, is rewarded by an endless stock of some requisite article of subsistence 105. In Hellenic fable, we have already seen the dart of Apollo enabling Abaris to live without appearing to partake of sustenance; and the narrative of Cleombrotus, also noticed before, seems to imply some similar resource on the part of his Eastern traveller. Another mysterious personage of early Grecian fable, and whose goetic practices, like those of Abaris, have secured for him a dubious fame, is Epimenides the Cretan. Of him we are also told that he was never known to eat, but that he allayed his hunger by occasionally tasting a precious edible bestowed upon him by the Nymphs; and which he carefully kept preserved in an

104 Mr. Görres has observed, in speaking of Fortunatus, that the story of the goose which laid a golden egg is only a variation of this prolific subject; and that the history of the world contains little more than a kind of Argonautic expedition after the same golden fleece. For the other particulars referred to in the text, see Kinder-und Haus-Märchen, No. 60. 122. 130.

105 See Der Arme und der Reiche, in MM. Grimm's collection. The note on this story contains references to the same idea in the fictions of Greece, China, and India. It seems to have escaped these learned German antiquaries, that a much earlier notice of the same miraculous agency is to be found in the "widow's cruse" of the Old Testament, 2 Kings, chap. iv.

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