It is not, therefore, you perceive, our individual history alone that is rectified by this investigation. It supplies a vacuum in the history of the world: which could not be said to have been correct, so long as there was nothing known on the various topics now explained.[509]
Professor Müller,[510] in a very elaborate treatise upon the Antiquities of the Dorians, has been pleased to affect astonishment, through one of his notes, that Hecatæus should have believed in the existence of the Hyperboreans! It became him, unquestionably, so to do, because that the proofs of their existence were beyond his own reach. But though their reality, as well as locality, have been already put beyond disputation, I will, to justify the exclusiveness here proclaimed, enter again upon the subject, and, without following in detail, show, by the reverse of his positions, that his whole system of mythology is equally erroneous.
In this determination I will of course be acquitted of any intentional slight. Who could read Professor Müller’s work, and not be struck with the labour and the ingenuity which distinguish its every page? I yield to no man in my respect for his abilities, but I weep, from my soul, that his classic care was not bequeathed upon some other subject, rather than be split upon a rock by an ignis fatuus. I never saw such a waste of letters as his book exhibits! I never saw such learned research so miserably thrown away! And how could it be otherwise, his great object having been to make everything square to the reveries of the Grecians!—taking them as his clue, into a labyrinth of inextricability, through one inch of which neither conductor nor traveller could see their way!
Sweet pahlavi of the Hyperboreans, I will take you as my guide!
“———Nor be my thoughts
Presumptuous counted, if amid the calm
That soothes the vernal evening into smiles,
I steal impatient, from the sordid haunts
Of strife and low ambition, to attend
Thy sacred presence, in the sylvan shade,
By their malignant footstep ne’er profaned.”—Thomson.
CHAPTER XXX.
Before we descend to language, I shall collect the historical concordances that bear upon this investigation.
Beo, a poetess of Delphi, mentions in the fragment of a poem, quoted by Pausanias, that three individuals, sons of Hyperboreans, and named Olen, Pagasus, and Agyeus, had founded the oracle of Delphi. Will it be credited that those three names are but representatives of three several orders of our Irish priests, viz. Ollam, Pagoes, and Aghois?[511]