He shall sleep a fearless stranger To the thought and Klip-pen, die dir, Schiffbruch drohten, än-gsten länger At the obsequies of the late Prince one of his compositions was performed, to which, therefore, a touching interest attaches. This was a chorale, which is perhaps the only effort of the Prince's known to the public, and which, it must be owned, is scarcely equal to the rest. This probably arises from the monotony of a style of writing which, indeed, save in the hands of a very great master, can scarcely take the shape of anything original. As, however, it was thus solemnly associated with this good Prince and accomplished gentleman, it may be inserted here. There is also a very simple but touching sort of Volkslied, unpublished as far as is known, and beginning "Einsam." This, then, is a fair review of these agreeable efforts, which, by their own unadorned merits, deserve recognition. But they are far more valuable as an index of real accomplishment and of true sentiments; and will have their part in proving the Prince to have been a man of elegant tastes and true feeling. The oft-quoted image of a straw proving the direction of the wind holds good here-and any musician may be safely appealed to, to say whether these pieces do not show true instinct and refinement. UNDERGROUND GODS PHILOLOGY has prepared strange surprises for us: it has introduced us to Aryan ancestors, of whose existence we had no previous conception; it has shown us that the Hindoo is our cousin, a little further removed than Slave and Celt, than Gaul and Roman, but still a collateral descendant of our original Aryan progenitor, who kept flocks and herds and reaped his corn in Central Asia; it has shown us that Indra and Zeus were merely different names for the same mythological conception; and now, by the help of the Rig Veda and the laws of Manou, it has proved that, after all, Indra and Zeus are quite parvenus in the world of mythology, and that the chief religion of primitive Greek and Roman, as well as the Hindoo cousin, consisted for centuries in the worship of underground gods-his own dead ancestors. Thus, when we think of primitive Greek and Roman worship, we must dismiss from our minds all notion of Jupiter and Juno, Diana and Apollo, Minerva, Pluto, and Neptune, and all the venerable hierarchy who feasted on Olympus, and were served out of elegant-shaped ewers by Hebe and Ganymedes. The first worship of Greek and Roman was the worship of the dead; and the knowledge of this will enlighten us much as to the meaning of many obscure passages in old writers, and the reason of many otherwise unintelligible ceremonieskept alive even up to the time of, and after, the advent of Christianity. Vespasian, just before his death, exclaimed mockingly, "Alas, I think I feel my divinity coming upon me!" Væ, puto Deus fio!-he being evidently a sceptic as to the apotheosis, or promotion to divinity, of deceased emperors; which seems to us so strange a proceeding when we first read of it. However, the exceptional apotheoses of Roman emperors were but the last surviving application of a belief which had formerly been universal. In the prehistoric times of Greece and Rome, not only every celebrated man, but every man whatever who belonged to a family which counted as a family and was not an outcast once, became a divinity on his death to his descendants, who worshipped in him, and all ancestors, the principle of life which they inherited. It must not be imagined, however, that they fancied their progenitors were taken up to any sort of Olympus, or spent pleasant after-lives in the twilight repose of the Elysian fields. Olympus and the Elysian fields were quite a later invention, and only heroes of very exemplary merit were ever promoted to those quarters at all. No; they imagined that in after-life the dead continued existence in some sort of dim underground mundus, or region, to which they found access from their graves. The primitive Greek and Roman buried his father, not as in later times by the road-side, but in a field near his house, and the ancestors were deposited there one after the other; and the descendants believed, in a benighted way, that they had need of meat and drink: they placed food in their tombs, and even holes were made in the ground into which wine and milk could be poured for the use of the deceased; and it was thought that unless this underground population were duly considered, paid attention to, and properly kept good-tempered with regular supplies of comestibles, they would not rest quiet. There was immense power of doing mischief in them; and as their numbers must have become in time something overwhelming, they were served more in fear than in reverence. The ordinary pagan, who eschewed the dangerous heresies of philosophy, up to the last continued to feed the soul of his great-grandfather in good faith, long after sophists and sceptics had ceased to do so from any other motive than avoidance of public scandal, after the death of Anaxagoras or Socrates, or when the scoffing Lucian wrote, "if a man has no son to feed him after death, his soul is condemned to everlasting hunger." Not a pleasant thing this, for a neighbour to believe that an impious householder hard by was keeping the souls of his ancestors in a state of raving famine; and that thus a whole multitude of angry spirits were let loose on society, to inflict upon it all kinds of disasters—frightfu diseases for the body, mildew and blight for their corn-harvests; not to speak of their going over and siding with the enemy in case of warfare. Consequently a man who was known to be on bad terms with his underground relatives had little mercy to expect from those about him; it was no matter if you put him to death, for you might appease him in his after-life by feeding him properly, and giving him milk and honey, or anything else supposed to be pleasant for a ghost; and, provided some other male descendant was left to continue to feed the family-ancestors, the whole community would be a gainer. Up to the present day the Hindoos still preserve the custom of giving repasts to the dead. Even in the Augustine age, Virgil, speaking of the burial of Polydorus, says they shut his soul up in his tomb; and Cicero writes, the dead were formerly believed to lead the rest of their existence underground; for men of our race, at all events, never seem to have entertained the notion that the soul was mortal, and had finished its career with the breath of the body. So completely indeed did the ancients believe that the dead lived an underground life, that they placed not only wine and food, but arms, vases, and clothing in their tombs. The Etruscan sepulchres are little chambers fitted up with every domestic comfort; and they sacrificed slaves and horses over their places of interment, so that the deceased might not want a becoming state in the under-world. After the capture of Troy, when the Greek chiefs were about to return home with a fair |