The legends which tell us how woman was then the civilizer, the softener, the purifier, the perpetual witness to fierce and coarse men, that there were nobler aims in life than pleasure, and power, and the gratification of revenge; that not self-assertion, but self-sacrifice was the Divine ideal, toward which all must aspire.

It may seem strange that such a legend as this of "The Three Dead and the Three Living," with such a moral, should become the origin of a dance.

The legend is "'La Jeune Fille et la Mort,' or Coquelin ainé, presenting Sarah Bernhardt the bill of costs of her fugue."

These legends are the translation into poetic fact of the peace and love surrounding Mahomet during the five years he spent with Hailima; for in all primitive communities every experience must pass through transmutation into the definite and tangible and be given a local habitation and a name.

The legend that the bees had come from Venus, with the perfect cereal, wheat, as patterns of perfection from that farther evolved planetfascinated, became the leit-motif of his thoughts for weeks.

The legend of Marsyas and the mythus of the Fall are companion pictures.

Thus the legend of the third degree is an allegory evidently to be interpreted as teaching a restoration to life; and this we learn from the legend itself, without any previous understanding.

The coarse legend of "death is the sleep of eternity,"* is only a compendium of the fine-drawn theories of the more elaborate materialist, and the depositaries of the dead will not corrupt more by the exhibition of this desolating standard, than the libraries of the living by the volumes which hold out the same oblivion to vice, and discouragement to virtue.

It may be all very well for you or me, whose legend should be "Prandeo, poto, cano, ludo, lego, coeno, quiesco," to laugh at them; but who shall say that they did not do their best, and, if they were stupid, pavonian, arrogant, self-sufficient, and top-heavy, that they were not honestly so?

The legend is a charming anachronism, unless, indeed, Saint Luke was only a spiritual presence;but, as the whole incident was miraculous, the greater the anachronism, the greater the miracle.

" Goethe appears to have derived his knowledge of the Faust legend partly from the work of Widmann, published in 1599,[10] partly from another more modern in its form, which appeared in 1728, and partly from the puppet plays exhibited in Frankfort and other cities of Germany, of which that legend was then a favorite theme.

The old legend is a story of sin and damnation.

The legend is "'La Jeune Fille et la Mort,' or Coquelin ainé, presenting Sarah Bernhardt the bill of costs of her fugue."

But if, on the other hand, it be admitted that the legend of the third degree is a fiction,that the whole masonic and extra-scriptural account of Hiram Abif is simply a myth,it could not, in the slightest degree, affect the theory which it is my object to establish.

For in the Gondal legend the idea of the Doomed Child, an idea that haunted Emily Brontë, recurs perpetually, and suggests that the Gondal legend is the proper place of "The Two Children", and "The Wanderer from the Fold", which appear in the posthumous Selections of eighteen-fifty.

That the power of a man's spirit might possibly go to the length of turning a tragedy into a comedy is not admitted; nevertheless, almost all the primitive legends of the world are comedies, not only in the sense that they have a happy ending, but in the sense that they are based upon a certain optimistic assumption that the hero is destined to be the destroyer of the monster.

But whether this be so or not,whether the legend be a fact or a fiction, a history or a myth,this, at least, is certain: that it was adopted by the Solomonic Masons of the temple as a substitute for the idolatrous legend of the death of Dionysus which belonged to the Dionysiac Mysteries of the Tyrian workmen.

The legend on which it is founded, a mediaeval myth here transferred to classical times, is also the groundwork of Browning's ballad, "The Boy and the Angel.

The whole legend is, in fact, an historical myth, in which the mystic number of the steps, the process of passing to the chamber, and the wages there received, are inventions added to or ingrafted on the fundamental history contained in the sixth chapter of Kings, to inculcate important symbolic instruction relative to the principles of the order.

The legend of the painter who kept his model on a cross in order that he might the more minutely represent the agonies of death by crucifixion, is but a mythus of the realistic method carried to its logical extremity.

In all probability this legend is a mythical history, in which truth is very largely and preponderatingly mixed with fiction.

The Legend of Jane Shore is the most finished of all his works, from which I have taken a quotation.

It is a theory of some, both ancient and modern writers, that all the pagan gods were once human beings, and that the legends and traditions of mythology are mere embellishments of the acts of these personages when alive.

If the peasants and the people complain of the taxes, and won't work six days in the week, "Let them starve," says the marchesa"let them starve; so much the better!" In her opinion, the legend of the Holy Countenance is a lie, got up by priests for money; so she comes into the city from Corellia, and shuts up her palace, publicly to show her opinion.

These legends are mainly later accretions, but the kernel of truth within them is not difficult to discover.