ratongas, in the Marquesas, and in the Gambier Islands, none of them nearer to each other than about one thousand miles, and all from two thousand to three thousand miles from Hawaii, in each of these, the latest twenty-five or thirty generations run quite distinctly from each other up to some founder, in each case, whom they venerate as having first come over the sea; while back of these later twenty-five or thirty generations, the traditions and genealogies become partially mixed names and legends from one group appearing in the others. Thus for thirteen generations back of this migratory epoch the genealogies of Hawaii and the Marquesas give the same names, all but one, and in the same order; and even in New Zealand, nearly five thousand miles away, the traditions show four generations of chiefs and their wives, in which seven out of the eight names are plainly identical with those of four chiefs and their wives in ancient Hawaii. It is in this period anterior to the great migrations that the chief difficulties occur in the Hawaiian genealogies, and Mr. Fornander believes the explanation to beand it seems likely that the great Hawaiian chiefs of that roving period adopted into their genealogies some of the great names which they found especially celebrated among their distant kinsfolk. But even if we simply take the last twenty-eight generations of distinctly historic chiefs, we have a pretty clear history for eight hundred years, and that is quite sufficient to illustrate the argument for the large reliability of tradition when at all carefully handed down. Because, for these eight centuries the names are evidently historic. Elements of mythology and miracle, of witchcraft and sorcery, still come in, indeed, but as a whole it is a recognizable human history. It tells of famous warriors and famous prophetesses. It notes their marriages, their children, and their deaths. It narrates

wars for love and wars for the succession; and all through it links itself naturally in, here and there, with the great works, institutions, changes, which form the usual landmarks of a people's life. It tells how one great temple was originally built, thirty generations back, by a certain high priest, who was more powerful than his king; and how they passed the stones for it, hand to hand, from the quarry, nine miles away. It tells how the son of a famous king, twenty-seven generations ago, cut — it actually appears to be a natural passage artificially deepened the channel by which the great estuary of Pearl River is still navigable. It tells how, twentythree generations ago, the son of another king established the great order of Hawaiian nobility, which to this day regulates the titles and precedence of the chiefs with the authority and precision of a herald's college. It tells when the road over the great mountains was paved, a stupendous work, of which traces still remain. Later on, it tells how, twelve generations ago, arrived a vessel, which was wrecked in the surf, and from which the commander and his sister, white people, swam ashore, prostrating themselves upon the beach, and afterwards living and marrying among the natives. Here is a point at which it is possible to take soundings into contemporary European records; for twelve generations ago, which would be somewhere about A. D. 1520, the vessels that would be afloat on the Pacific Ocean and liable to be wrecked there could almost be counted on the fingers. Mr. Fornander has found in Burney's Discoveries in the South Sea that on October 31, 1527, three vessels names and numbers of the crews all given - left a little port in New Spain for the Moluccas, a course which would take them a few degrees south of Hawaii. Only one of these ships ever turned up, and it brought word that when they had sailed about one thousand leagues a great storm

These traditions in Hawaii, as in the other groups, are preserved in monotonous chants, which remind one most of all of Hiawatha, by the way in which the memory is helped by the frequent duplication of part of one line in the next. Of these chants there are great numbers, some of them many hundreds of lines in length; many bearing marks, in their rude archaic forms of speech, of great antiquity; and all of them chanted to-day, just as they have been, certainly for generations, possibly for centuries. At first these were guarded with the utmost jealousy; indeed, all over the Polynesian groups they are regarded as peculiarly sacred, are made known only to foreigners who have won their entire confidence, and even to them have been given to be written down only with misgiving and trembling.

One link more is needed. How about the formation of such traditions? We are able to obtain a glimpse even of this. Mariner, in his account of the natives of the Tonga Islands, tells how, when he had resided among them long enough to understand their language, he found that they had songs about various events in their history. These were chanted by a special class of singers, and he describes how when one of these, who was the most famous, had composed a new chant he taught it carefully, line by line, with constant repetition, to a company of his singer-scholars, until it was finally fixed in their memory in the form in which it would ever afterwards be sung and handed down. He heard such a song chanted describing Captain Cook's visit, some forty years before, and except for a little exaggeration it was tolerably

correct in its account. Here we see such tradition in its actual formation; for this chant had already passed into that permanent shape in which, like the Iliad, it would probably be perpetuated indefinitely. A different race these from the ancient Brahmins, and a different kind of tradition from the Vedas; yet how alike the care taken for their transmission this teaching to selected pupils, line by line, repeated over and over again, until indelibly fastened on the mind- - to that which the Vedas prescribed five centuries before the Christian era, and which Max Müller tells us is still practiced to-day!

What, in conclusion, is the practical point to which we are led by these various lines of indication? For this is what they are, lines of indication and suggestion, not of any absolute proof. Some things, indeed, they prove. They prove that memory disciplined and systematized is perfectly capable of carrying and handing down traditions of any length and any minuteness of successive names and details. They show what has in different ages and countries been done in this way; and so they demonstrate, at least, how utterly absurd it is to lay down any a priori canon of narratives being untrustworthy because merely tradition. What has been adduced surely tends to show that tradition in the ancient world was not in general lightly regarded; was looked on as a sacred thing; was protected by solemnities and cautions which have no analogy whatever in the looseness of modern hearsay and repetition, and so, in fact, was not the mere accidental residuum of what had not been forgotten, but was worked up into a distinct system of recording and transmitting what needed to be remembered.

Tradition was not, of course, such a sacred and guarded thing among all peoples, nor to the same degree in all ages even of the same people. Traditions often bear on their very face the char

acteristics of exaggeration and elements of miracle which cannot be received as sober history. But so, likewise, do But so, likewise, do many historical records and monuments. Rameses and Sheshonk are sculptured in the Egyptian bas-reliefs as giants among pigmies, and sometimes figures of the gods are at hand directing or shielding them; yet no one proposes, on this account, to treat these monuments as historically valueless. The same tendency has doubtless just as naturally magnified and surrounded with elements of legendary marvel the heroes of the bardic songs, the Homeric poems, and the Hawaiian chants. Possibly the perplexing longevity of the patriarchs may have been simply the Hebrew analogue for the gigantic stature of the sculptured Pharaohs. But these exaggerations are usually in each case easily discerned and easily allowed for, and ought not in themselves to discredit the historical value of the traditions any more than of the monuments. Travelers say that the Arab who will lie all day long about the qualities or achievements of his horse would fear a curse if he should falsify its pedigree. Thus, while in some directions ancient traditions may often have been magnifying myths, at the basis of all, the peoples of the older world want ed reality, the facts of their past, just as much as we do.

So, out of all the scattered lights which we can gather on the subject, a few helpful principles of criticism for the practical use of tradition suggest themselves, besides the general conviction that it must be more trustworthy than it has been usually regarded. For one thing, it seems a fair canon of elucidation that tradition is most trustworthy among those peoples whom we can discern to have been specially careful in cherishing and transmitting it. This, again: that it may be credited with having best retained that class of facts of the far past about which a people have throughout their history shown them

selves most solicitous. A third rule will, I think, commend itself: that traditions which have been handed down in stereotyped forms of words are of especial value. Moreover, from the general qualities of human nature, I think these supplementary distinctions will approve themselves, that the things which most impress themselves on a people's memory, and are likely to perpetuate themselves in their traditions, are such as these: the great events which have changed their country, their religion, or their modes of life, and the great personalities and places associated with such events; while, on the other hand, mere numbers will be the weakest point; and as for dates, it is prob ably with the strata of tradition as with the strata of the earth, that—to apply a principle once given to me by Professor Boyd Dawkins- tradition, like geology, "knows nothing of dates, but only of successions.”

These are, however, only hints, — suggestions of what may possibly be the available working principles by which to apply in historical investigations the fundamental thought of the trustworthiness of early tradition. But even apart from such more exact applications of it, it is a helpful thought. If there is any thing in these facts which I have collected, they mean at least this: that we may take up again the discarded traditions of the old heroic ages and of the world's morning time with far more confidence than has been usual of late years. mer will be read with a new interest, and Herodotus, and — best of all — the old-world histories in the Bible. I know they will not give us detailed narratives, by which this or that point can be proved, or names and dates to be learned off as school-boy tasks. But they will give us glimpses of the ancient days; pictures, here and there, of such men and women as loved and fought in those old buried cities of Hissarlik, or meditated by the Ganges, or wandered

Ho

from Chaldea with Abraham, or followed Moses out of the mighty empire of Egypt into those wild solitudes of Sinai; -pictures of life; landmarks of great

deeds, and thoughts, and worships, and laws; a dawn to history, not of abstract theories, or dazzling, unreal sun myths, but of real peoples and real men. Brooke Herford.

II.

THE COUNTRY OF THE LOIRE.

V.

THE second time I went to Blois I took a carriage for Chambord and came back by the Château de Cheverny and the forest of Russy; a charming little expedition, to which the beauty of the afternoon (the finest in a rainy season that was spotted with bright days) contributed not a little. To go to Chambord, you cross the Loire, leave it on one side, and strike away through a country in which salient features become less and less numerous, and which at last has no other quality than a look of intense and peculiar rurality, the characteristic, even when it is not the charm, of so much of the landscape of France. This is not the appearance of wildness, for it goes with great cultivation; it is simply the presence of the delving, drudging, saving peasant. But it is a deep, unrelieved rusticity. It is a peasant's landscape; not, as in England, a landlord's. On the way to Chambord you enter the flat and sandy Sologne. The wide horizon opens out like a great potager, without interruptions, without an eminence, with here and there a long, low stretch of wood. There is an absence of hedges, fences, signs of property; everything is absorbed in the general flatness the patches of vineyard, the scattered cottages, the villages, the children, planted and staring and almost always pretty, the women in the

fields, the white caps, the faded blouses, the big sabots. At the end of an hour's drive (they will assure you at Blois that even with two horses you will spend double that time) I passed through a sort of gap in a wall, which does duty as the gateway of the domain of an exiled pretender. I drove along a straight avenue, through a disfeatured parkthe park of Chambord has twenty-one miles of circumference a very sandy, scrubby, melancholy plantation, in which the timber must have been cut many times over and is to-day a mere tangle of brushwood. Here, as in so many spots in France, the traveler perceives that he is in a land of revolutions. Nevertheless, its great extent and the long perspective of its avenues give this desolate boskage a certain majesty; just as its shabbiness places it in agreement with one of the strongest impressions of the château. You follow one of these long perspectives a proportionate time, and at last you see the chimneys and pinnacles of Chambord rise apparently out of the ground. The filling-in of the wide moats that formerly surrounded it has in vulgar parlance let it down, and given it an appearance of topheaviness that is at the same time a magnificent grotesqueness. The towers, the turrets, the cupolas, the gables, the lanterns, the chimneys, look more like the spires of a city than the salient points of a single building. You emerge from the avenue and find yourself at the foot of an enormous fantastic mass. Chambord has a strange mixture of society and solitude.

A little village clusters within view of its stately windows, and a couple of inns near by offer entertainment to pilgrims. These things, of course, are incidents of the political proscription which hangs its thick veil over the place. Chambord is truly royal — royal in its great scale, its grand air, its indifference. to common considerations. If a cat may look at a king, a palace may look at a tavern. I enjoyed my visit to this extraordinary structure as much as if I had been a legitimist; and indeed there is something interesting in any monument of a great system, any bold presentation of a tradition. You leave your vehicle at one of the inns, which are very decent and tidy, and in which every one is very civil, as if in this latter respect the influence of the old régime pervaded the neighborhood, and you walk across the grass and the gravel to a small door -a door infinitely subordinate and conferring no title of any kind on those who enter it. Here you ring a bell, which a highly respectable person answers (a person perceptibly affiliated, again, to the old régime), after which she ushers you across a vestibule into an inner court. Perhaps the strongest impression I got at Chambord came to me as I stood in this court. The woman who had admitted me did not come with me; I was to find my guide somewhere else. The specialty of Chambord is its prodigious round towers. There are, I believe, no less than eight of them, placed at each angle of the inner and outer square of buildings; for the castle is in the form of a larger structure which incloses a smaller one. One of these towers stood before me in the court; it seemed to fling its shadow over the place; while above, as I looked up, the pinnacles and gables, and even the enormous chimneys, soared into the bright blue air. The place was empty and silent; shadows of gargoyles, of extraordinary projections, were thrown across the clear gray surfaces. One felt

that the whole thing was monstrous. A cicerone appeared, a languid young man in a rather shabby livery, and led me about with a mixture of hurry and delay, of condescension and humility. I do not profess to understand the plan of Chambord, and I may add that I do not even desire to do so; for it is much more entertaining to think of it, as you can so easily, as an irresponsible insoluble labyrinth. Within it is a wilderness of empty chambers, a royal and romantic barrack. The exiled prince to whom it gives its title has not the means to keep up four hundred rooms; he contents himself with preserving the huge outside. The repairs of the prodigious roof alone must absorb a large part of his revenue. The great feature of the interior is the celebrated double staircase, rising straight through the building, with two courses of steps, so that people may ascend and descend without meeting. This staircase is a truly majestic piece of humor; it gives you the note, as it were, of Chambord. It opens on each landing to a vast guard-room, in four arms, radiations of the winding shaft. One of these arms served as a theatre on the occasion on which Molière's Bourgeois Gentilhomme was played to Louis XIV. My guide made me climb to the great open-work lantern which, springing from the roof at the termination of the great staircase (surmounted here by a smaller one), forms the pinnacle of the bristling crown of Chambord. This lantern is tipped with a huge fleur de lys in stone — the only one, I believe, that the Revolution did not succeed in pulling down. Here, from narrow windows, you look over the wide, flat country and the tangled, melancholy park, with the rotation of its straight avenues. Then you walk about the roof, in a complication of galleries, terraces, balconies, through the multitude of chimneys and gables. This roof, which is in itself a sort of castle in the air, has an extravagant, fabulous quality,