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is, Spenser has a mythology of his own; nor would belie his brethren the romance writers, where merely authority is to be put against authority."

We have thus three out of our four great poets, who are for taking sirens as mermaids; and the fourth is not wanting. Shakespeare's "Mermaid on a dolphin's back," is part of an allegory on England and Queen Elizabeth, and is the most poetical bit of politics on record; but it shows that he entertained the same mixed notion of the mermaid and siren.

"Once I sat upon a promontory,

And heard a mermaid on a dolphin's back
Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath,
That the rude sea grew civil at her song,

And certain stars shot madly from their spheres,
To hear the sea-maid's music."

MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DReam.

A siren then, in the modern sense of the word, may be regarded as a mermaid who sings. Metaphorically, a siren is any female who charms by singing; and this is the most ancient acceptation of the term, as Plato has shown, by calling the presiders over the spheres of heaven sirens.

"Then listen I,"

says the Genius in Milton's "Arcades,"

"To the celestial Syrens' harmony,

That sit upon the nine infolded spheres."

The word, by the way, should be spelled with an i, the Greek word not being syren but seiren; which, according to Bochart, comes from the Phoenician seir, a singer. In this etymology, we are carried back to the probable origin of these and a great many other marvels, which may have commenced with the primeval navigators, who had the

world fresh before them, and fanciful eyes to see with. If the fair inhabitants of the south of Italy resembled in those days what they are now (and climate and other local circumstances render it probable), a crew of Phoenician adventurers had only to touch at the coast of Naples to bring away the story at once. In the south, where there is more luxury than fishing, the songs of their mistresses might suggest that of birds, and the sirens be gifted with plumage. Had they gone to the northern seas, where there was more fishing than luxury, the siren would have been the mermaid; and it is possible, that from the romances of the north, the modern idea descended into the poetry of Italy and of Spenser.

ance.

"The havfrue (half-woman) or mermaid," says Mr. Keightley, whom we meet in all the pleasant places of fiction, "is represented in the popular tradition (of Scandinavia) sometimes as a good, at other times as an evil and treacherous, being. She is beautiful in her appearFishermen sometimes see her in the bright summer's sun, when a thin mist hangs over the sea, sitting on the surface of the water, and combing her long golden hair with a golden comb, or driving up her snow-white cattle to feed on the strands and small islands. At other times she comes as a beautiful maid, chilled and shivering with the cold of the night, to the fires the fishers have kindled, hoping by this means to entice them to her love. Her appearance prognosticates both storm and ill-success in their fishing. People that are drowned, and whose bodies are not found, are believed to have been taken into the dwellings of the mermaids. These beings are also supposed to have the power of foretelling future events. A mermaid, we are told, prophesied the birth of Christian IV. of Denmark; and

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These visions have naturally taken a still more palpable shape with some dwellers near the sea, and craft has endeavored to profit by them in the exhibition of their actual bodies. The author of an agreeable abstract of zoology, published some years back, tells us of a King of Portugal, and a Grand Master of the Order of St. James, who had a suit at law to determine which class of animals these monsters belong to, either man or fish. This," he adds, "is a sort of inductive proof that such animals had been then seen and closely examined; unless we suppose that, as in the case of the child said to have been born with a golden tooth, the discussion took place before the fact was ascertained." +

We ought to know, on these occasions, whether the mermaid is caught fresh, or only shown after death like a mummy. An exhibition of the latter kind took place some years since in London, and was soon detected; but so many deceptions of the sort have been practised, that naturalists seem to think it no longer worth their while to talk about them. A piece of one animal is joined to another, and the two are dried together. Linnæus exposed an imposition of this kind during his travels on the Continent, and is said to have been obliged to leave the town for it.

The writer just quoted proceeds to inform us, that "in

"Fairy Mythology," vol. i. p. 241.

↑ "A description of more than Three Hundred Animals, &c., with an Appendix on Allegorical and Fabulous Animals," 1826; p. 363.

the year 1560, on the western coasts of the Island of Ceylon, some fishermen are said to have brought up, at one draught of a net, seven mermen and maids, of which several Jesuits, and among them F. H. Henriquez, and Dinas Bosquey, physician to the Viceroy of Goa, are reported to have been witnesses; and it is added," he says, "that the physician who examined them, and made dissections of them with a great deal of care, asserted that all the parts, both internal and external, were found perfectly conformable to those of men."

"Several Jesuits," we fear, will be regarded as no better authority than the "five justices" of Autolycus:—

Aut. Here's another ballad, of a fish, that appeared upon the coast on Wednesday, the fourscore of April, forty thousand fathom above water, and sung this ballad against the hard hearts of maids. It was thought she was a woman, and was turned into a cold fish, for she would not exchange flesh with one that loved her. The ballad is very pitiful, and as true.

Dorcas. Is it true too, think you?

Aut. Five justices' hands at it! and witnesses more than my pack will hold."-WINTER'S TALE, Act iv. sc. 3.

A later edition (if I mistake not, for I had but a glance of it) of the same work, goes almost so far as to intimate its belief in a mermaid's having been seen by a lady, off the coast of Scotland, in company with three other spectators. The names are mentioned, and letters and details given. That the persons in question thought they beheld such a creature, is to be conceded, supposing the documents to be genuine; nor would it become any reasonable sceptic, especially in a time like the present, to say what is or is not probable on the part of creation.* But it is to be feared that in this, as in the demands of a less

* Sir Walter Scott, in "The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border," mentions this phenomenon, and says that the evidence serves to show "either that imag

intellectual appetite, your fish must be "caught" before it is swallowed. Extraordinary particulars were given, in this instance, of the human aspect of the vision, of its tossing its hair back from its brow, and its being much annoyed by a bird which was hovering over it, and which it warned off repeatedly with its hands. The most ingenious conjecture I ever heard advanced respecting the ordinary mistakes about mermaids was, that somebody may have actually seen a mermaid, comb and all, dancing in the water, but that it was a figure of wood, struck off from some shipwrecked vessel.

I am travelling out of the world, however, when I get into these realms of prose and matter-of-fact. I will conclude this paper with the two most striking descriptions of the mermaid I ever met with ; – one, indeed, purporting to be that of a true one, but evidently of the wildest oriental manufacture; the other, in the pages of a young living poet, worthy of the name in its most poetical sense.

D'Herbelot, in his article on the "Yagiouge and Magiouge" (Gog and Magog), tells us of a certain Salam, who was sent by Vathek, ninth Caliph of the race of the Abassides, to explore the famous Caspian Gates, and who being in

ination played strange tricks with the witnesses, or that the existence of mermaids is no longer a matter of question."

Simon Wilkin, in one of the notes to his edition of Sir Thomas Browne, makes a learned and ingenious argument on the probable existence of the mermaid; and De Quincey says that Southey once remarked to him, that if the mermaid had been differently named (as, suppose, a mer-ape) nobody would have questioned its existence any more than that of sea-cows, sea-lions, &c. "The mermaid has been discredited by her human name and her legendary human habits. If she would not coquette so much with melancholy sailors, and brush her hair so assiduously upon solitary rocks, she would be carried on our books for as honest a reality, as decent a female, as many that are assessed to the poor-rates.". "'-ED.

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