Seriously, Why should not these dragons have been simply what the Greek word dragon means-what the earliest romances, the Norse myths, and the superstitions of the peasantry in many parts of England to this day assert them to have been-'mighty worms,' huge snakes? All will agree that the Python, the representative in the old world of the 'Boa Constrictor' of the new, lingered in the Homerie age, if not later, both in Greece and in Italy. It existed on the opposite coast of Africa (where it is now extinct) in the time of Regulus; we believe, from the traditions of all nations, that it existed to a far later date in more remote and barbarous parts of Europe. There is every reason to suppose that it still lingered in England after the invasion of the Cymri-say not earlier than B.C. 600-for it was among them an objeet of worship; and we question whether they would have been likely to have adored a foreign animal, and, as at Abury, built enormous temples in imitation of its windings, and called them by its name.

The only answer to these traditions has as yet been, that no reptile of that bulk is known in cold climates. Yet the Python still lingers in the Hungarian marshes. A few years ago a huge snake, as large as the Pythons of Hindostan, spread havoc among the flocks and terror among the peasantry. Had it been Ariosto's 'Orc,' an à priori argument from science would have had weight. A marsupiate sea-monster is horribly unorthodox; and the dragon, too, has doubtless been made a monster of, but most unjustly; his legs have been patched on by crocodile-slaying crusaders, while his wings where did they come from? From the traditions of 'flying serpents,' which have so strangely haunted the deserts of Upper Egypt from the time of the old Hebrew prophets, and which may not, after

all, be such lies as folk fancy. How scientific prigs shook with laughter at the notion of a flying dragon! till one day geology revealed to them, in the Pterodactylus, that a real flying dragon, on the model of Carlo Crivelli's in Mrs. Jameson's book, with wings before and legs behind, only more monstrous than that, and than all the dreams of Seba and Aldrovandus (though some of theirs, to be sure, have seven heads), got its living once on a time in this very island of England! But such is the way of this wise world! When Le Vaillant, in the last century, assured the Parisians that he had shot a giraffe at the Cape, he was politely informed that the giraffe was fabulous, extinct-in short, that he lied; and now, behold! the respectable old unicorn (and good Tories ought to rejoice to hear it) has been discovered at last by a German naturalist, Von Müller, in Abyssinia, just where our fathers told us to look for it! And why should we not find the flying serpent, too? The interior of Africa is as yet an unknown world of wonders; and we may yet discover there, for aught we know, the descendants of the very satyr who chatted with St. Anthony.

No doubt the discovery of huge fossil animals, as Mrs. Jameson says, on the high authority of Professor Owen, may have modified our ancestors' notions of dragons: but in the old serpent worship we believe the real explanation of these stories is to be found. There is no doubt that human victims, and even young maidens, were offered to these snake gods; even the sunny mythology of Greece retains horrible traces of such customs, which lingered in Arcadia, the mountainfastness of the old and conquered race. Similar cruelties existed among the Mexicans; and there are but too many traces of it throughout the history of heathendom.

The same superstition may, as the legends assert, have lingered on, or been, at least, revived during the later ages of the empire, in remote provinces, left in their primæval barbarism, at the same time that they were brutalized by the fiendish exhibitions of the Circus, which the Roman governors found it their interest to introduce everywhere. Thus the serpent became naturally regarded as the manifestation of the evil spirit by Christians as well as by the old Hebrews; thus, also, it became the presiding genius of the malaria and fever which arose from the fens haunted by it a superstition which gave rise to the theory that the tales of Hercules and the Hydra, Apollo and the mud-Python, St. George and the Dragon, were sanitary-reform allegories, and the monsters whose poisonous breath destroyed cattle and young maidens only typhus and consumption. We see no reason why early Christian heroes should not have actually met with such snake gods, and felt themselves bound, like Southey's Madoc, or Daniel in the old rabbinical story, whose truth has never been disproved, to destroy the monsters at all risk. We see no reason, either, why their righteous daring may not have been crowned with victory; and suspect that on such events were gradually built up the dragon-slaying legends which charmed all Europe, and grew in extravagances and absurdities, till they began to degenerate into the bombast of the 'Seven Champions,' and expired in the immortal ballad of the Dragon of Wantley,' in which More of More Hall, on the morning of his battle with the monster, invoked the saints no more, but

To make him strong and mighty

He drank by the tale

Six pots of ale

And a quart of aqua-vitæ.

So ended the sublime sport of dragon-slaying. Its only remnant may now be seen in Borneo, whither that noble Christian man, Bishop Macdougall, took out the other day a six-chambered rifle, on the ground that 'while the alligators ate his school-children at Sarawak, it was his duty as a bishop to shoot the alligators.'

ALEXANDER SMITH AND ALEXANDER POPE.

ON

N reading this little book, and considering all the exaggerated praise and exaggerated blame which have been lavished on it, we could not help falling into many thoughts about the history of English poetry for the last forty years, and about its future destiny. Great poets, even true poets, are becoming more and more rare among us. There are those even who say that we have none; an assertion which, as long as Mr. Tennyson lives, we shall take the liberty of denying. But were he, which Heaven forbid, taken from us, whom have we to succeed him? And he,

too, is rather a poet of the sunset than of the dawn— of the autumn than of the spring. His gorgeousness is that of the solemn and fading year; not of its youth, full of hope, freshness, gay and unconscious life. Like some stately hollyhock or dahlia of this month's gardens, he endures while all other flowers are dying; but all around is winter-a mild one, perhaps, wherein a few annuals or pretty field weeds still linger on; but, like all mild winters, especially prolific in fungi, which, too, are not without their gaudiness, even their beauty, although bred only from the decay of higher organisms, the plagiarists of the vegetable world. Such is poetry in England; while in America the case is not much better. What more enormous scope for new poetic thought than that which the New World gives?

Yet

FRASER'S MAGAZINE, October, 1853.-' Poems,' by Alexander

Smith. London: Bogue. 1853.