One Scarcely Realizes How Full Of Poetry Was Their Mythology; All Successive Ages Have Drawn On It For Images Of Beauty Without Exhausting It; And Painters And Artists, To This Day, Are Fettered And Repressed By Vain Efforts To Reproduce It.

But as a religion for the soul and the heart, all this is vain and void; all powerless to give repose or comfort.

One who should seek repose on the bosom of such a mythology is as one who seeks to pillow himself on the many-tinted clouds of evening; soft and beautiful as they are, there is nothing real to them but their dampness and coldness.

Here M. and Madame Belloc entered, and as he wanted my opinion of the Diane, I let her read this part of the letter to him in French. You ought to have seen M. Belloc, with tears in his eyes, defending the old Greeks, and expounding to me, with all manner of rainbow illustrations, the religious meanings of Greek mythology, and the _morale_ of Greek tragedy. Such a whole souled devotion to a nation dead and gone could never be found but in France.

Madame Belloc was the translator of Maria Edgeworth by that lady's desire; corresponded with her for years, and still has many of her letters. Her translation of Uncle Tom has to me all the merit and all the interest of an original composition. In perusing it I enjoy the pleasure of reading the story with scarce any consciousness of its ever having been mine.

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