melody. Does he ever retire into deserts
and still places, this thing, smitten with
shame and horror of himself, and there, out
of the dreadful human mouth, people the
loneliness with sounds of lamentation and
remorse? Has he a yearning to be altogether
human, inextricably blended and incorporated
(like contradictions in dreams) with a
shuddering appetite for human blood? Perhaps
he is an allegory of those strange anomalies
of men in whose natures the bestial and the
divine are perpetually struggling for mastery.

It has been thought — and with great
appearance of probability—that the mantichora
is a poetical exaggeration of the hyena, the
face of which animal has a certain ghastly
resemblance to humanity, especially when it
is grinning. The peculiar sound like laughter,
for which it is celebrated, would also encourage
the growth of the fiction. Spenser (in book
iii., c. 7, of the Faery Queene) thus describes
an anomalous beast, which he compares to an
hyena:

Eftsoones out of her hidden cave she cald
An hideous beast of horrible aspect,
That could the stoutest corage have appald;
Monstrous, mishapt, and all his back was spect
With thousand spots of colours queint elect:
Thereto so swifte, that it all beasts did pas.
Like never yet did living eie detect;
But likest it to an hyena was,
That feeds on women's flesh, as others feede on gras.

The designation man-tegar, or man-tiger,
applied to a species of ape, has been derived
from a misinterpretation of the meaning of
the word mantichora.

Another explanation of this fable is
suggested by the alleged fact that, in the northern
parts of India (as the readers of Household
Words have already been made aware),
wolves have been known to carry off human
children — some of whom have been suckled
and reared by the females, and have been
subsequently discovered horribly degenerated
into a kind of wild beasts. If this phenomenon
be true, it brings our childhood's story
of Orson, as well as the classical tradition of
Romulus and Kemus, within the bounds of
possibility.

Fable also tells us of a bird with a human
countenance and cannibal tendencies, which
dies of horror of itself. Fuller, the Church
historian, thus finely alludes to this awful
creature :— I have read of a bird which hath
a face like, and yet will prey upon, a man ;
who, coming to the water to drink, and finding
there, by reflection, that he had killed one
like himself pineth away by degrees, and
never afterwards enjoyeth itself. Lamb,
after quoting this passage in his Essays,
remarks:— I do not know where Fuller read
of this bird ; but a more awful and affecting
story in Natural History, or rather in that
fabulous Natural History where poets and
mythologists found the phœnix and the
unicorn, and other strange fowl, is nowhere
extant. It is a fable which Sir Thomas Browne,
if he had heard of it, would have exploded
among his Vulgar Errors; but the delight
he would have taken in the discussing of its
probabilities would have shown that the truth
of the fact, though the avowed object of his
search, was not so much the motive which
put him upon the investigation, as those hidden
affinities and poetical analogies— those
essential verities in the application of strange
fable — which made him linger with such
reluctant delay among the last fading lights
of popular tradition, and not seldom to
conjure up a superstition, that had been long
extinct, from its dusty grave, to inter it himself
with greater ceremonies and solemnities
of burial. This subtle piece of criticism
should be borne in mind by the reader.
Fiction is often the symbol of those
perceptions beyond thought which dwell in the
remote solitudes of the soul.

Scythia, as well as Africa and India, was
celebrated among the ancients for its
monstrous productions. This country was
perhaps less known to the Greeks and Romans
than any other, of the existence of which
they were at all aware; and the imagination
would therefore naturally run riot with
regard to it. Even the grave and judicious
Herodotus tell us of the one-eyed Arimaspians,
who steal gold from the jealous guardianship
of gigantic griffins (see book iii.,
chap. 116) ; a tradition which furnished
Milton with a grand simile in the second
book of Paradise Lost. To vindicate his
veracity, the historian concludes his account
by an assurance that he does not believe
" that men are born with one eye, and yet in
other respects resemble the rest of mankind.
However," he adds, as though desirous that
the case should be stated fairly on both sides,
" the extremities of the world seem to
surround and enclose the rest of the earth, and
to possess those productions which we
account most excellent and rare." The one
eye of the Arimaspians has been said to mean
nothing more than that they closed one eye
when shooting with the bow.

Herodotus also speaks of men who are
naturally bald all their lives, from their birth
to their death; of a race of mountaineers
with goats' feet (which " to me," he says, " is
incredible "); of men who sleep six months
at a time (" but this I do not at all admit ");
and of others who can at their pleasure turn
themselves into wolves, and with equal ease
resume their natural shape. There was also
a Scythian race, called Panoti, whose ears
covered their whole bodies; and one of the
chief kings of the country, whose name was
Scythes (whence Scythia), was half a man
and half a serpent. According to Herodotus,
he was a son of Hercules, by a half human,
half-snaky mother.

Of the well-known monsters of classic
fable, Gorgons, Hydras, Centaurs, the Sphinx,
the Chimæra (properly so called), the