In illustration of the mode and manner of tradition, is the anecdote of Mr Hookham Frere, who states, that when the Maltese talk without reserve upon religious subjects, they say, “Everybody knows that Adam was the first man, but we alone know that he possessed fishing-boats;” which Bunsen says “Can be nothing but a Phœnician reminiscence.”—“Egypt,” iv. 215, the reminiscence of the legend of the Fisherman. Compare the Fisherman and his wife in Grimm’s “Popular Stories from Oral Tradition.”
[85] Vide “Bryant’s Mythology,” ii.
[86] After the exposition of his own theory, Mr Grote says—“It is in this point of view that the myths are important for any one who would correctly appreciate the general tone of Grecian thought and feeling, for they were the universal mental stock of the Hellenic world, common to men and women, rich and poor, ignorant and instructed, they were in every one’s memory and in every one’s mouth, while science and history were confined to comparatively few. We know from Thucydides how erroneously and carelessly the Athenian public of his day retained the history of Pisistratus, only one century past; but the adventures of the gods and heroes, the numberless explanatory legends attached to visible objects and periodical ceremonies, were the theme of general talk, and every man unacquainted with them would have found himself partially excluded from the sympathies of his neighbours.”—Hist. Greece, i. p. 608; comp. infra, [ch. xi.]
[87] “Ancient Law,” p. 117.
[88] “Pour trouver le veritable objet de ces dernières solemnités, dont les motifs sont compliqués, nous nous attachons à analyser leur cérémoniel et à chercher l’esprit de leurs usages; et cet esprit achève de nous faire reconnaître l’objet que nous n’avions d’abord qu’entrevu ou soupçonné, quelquefois même il nous développe encore la nature des motifs étrangers et mythologiques, et ces motifs se trouvent pour la plûpart n’être que des traditions du même fait qui ont été ou corrompués par le temps, ou travesties par des allégories.”—Boulanger, _“L’Antiquite devoilée par ses Usages”_, i. 31.
[89] Vide other lines of tradition indicated in B. iii., C. iii., of De Maistre, “Du Pape.”
[90] Sir J. Lubbock, Intro. to Nillson’s “Stone Age,” xii.
[91] E.g., Mr Grote says, in his Introduction, that through the combination and illustration of scanty facts, “the general picture of the Grecian world may now be conceived with a degree of fidelity which, considering our imperfect materials, it is curious to contemplate.”
The Duke of Argyll (“Primeval Man,” p. 24) says—“Within certain limits it is not open to dispute that the early condition of mankind is accessible to research. Contemporary history reaches back a certain way. Existing monuments afford their evidence for a considerable distance farther. Tradition has its own province still more remote; and latterly geology and archæology have met upon common ground—ground in which man and the mammoth have been found together.”
[92] Gibbon (“Decline and Fall,” i. 353) says, “But all this well-laboured system of German antiquities is annihilated by a single fact, too well attested to admit of any doubt, and of too decisive a nature to leave room for any reply. The Germans, in the days of Tacitus, were unacquainted with the use of letters, and the use of letters is the principal circumstance which distinguishes a civilised people from a herd of savages, incapable of knowledge or reflection. Without that artificial help, the human memory ever dissipates or corrupts the ideas intrusted to her charge.” Compare with Coleridge, infra, [p. 122]; Ozanam, infra, [ch. xiii].