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mere work of chance. Thus in the Edda the description of the Chaos; that vivifying breath which produces the giant Ymer; that sleep during which a male and female spring from his sides; that race of the sons of the gods; that deluge which only one man escapes, with his family, by means of a bark; that renewal of the world which succeeds; that first man and first woman created by the gods, and who receive from them life and motion: all this seems to be only remains of a more ancient and more general belief, which the Scythians carried with them when they retired into the North, and which they altered more slowly than the other nations. One may discover also in the very nature of these alterations the same spirit of allegory, the same desire of accounting for all the phænomena of nature by fictions, which hath suggested to other nations the greatest part of the fables with which their theology is infected. To conclude, the style itself, in which the expressions, one while sublime, one while extravagant and gigantic, are thrown together without art; the littlenesses that accompany the most magnificent descriptions; the disorder of the narrative; the uniform turn of the phrases, confirms to all who read this work an idea of a very remote antiquity, and a mode of thinking and
