alike; or to behold in the Sleeping Beauty or Thorn-Rose the ice-bound earth slumbering through the long winter months, until the sun-god's kisses win her back to life and warmth. But when we are asked to believe that William Tell is the storm-cloud, with his arrow of lightning and his iris bow bent against the sun, which is resting like a coin or a golden apple on the edge of the horizon, we cannot but feel, with the author of Curious Myths, that a little too much is exacted from us. "I must protest," he says, "against the manner in which our German friends fasten rapaciously upon every atom of history, sacred and profane, and demonstrate all heroes to represent the sun; all villains to be the demons of night or winter; all sticks and spears and arrows to be the lightning; all cows and sheep and dragons and swans to be clouds."
But then it must be remembered that Mr. Baring-Gould is the most tolerant and catholic of writers, with hardly a hobby he can call his own. Sympathizing with the sad destruction of William Tell, he casts a lance in honor of Saint George against Reynolds and Gibbon, and manifests a lurking weakness for mer-
