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the city, scoffed and jeered at all whom they met, and engaged among themselves in a fight, striking and throwing stones at each

other. Another Roman king who perished by violence was Tatius, the Sabine colleague of Romulus. It is said that he was at Lavinium

offering a public sacrifice to the ancestral gods, when some men, to whom he had given umbrage, despatched him with the sacrificial

knives and spits which they had snatched from the altar. The occasion and the manner of his death suggest that the slaughter may

have been a sacrifice rather than an assassination. Again, Tullus Hostilius, the successor of Numa, was commonly said to have been

killed by lightning, but many held that he was murdered at the instigation of Ancus Marcius, who reigned after him. Speaking of the

more or less mythical Numa, the type of the priestly king, Plutarch observes that "his fame was enhanced by the fortunes of the

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later kings. For of the five who reigned after him the last was deposed and ended his life in exile, and of the remaining four not one died a natural death; for three of them were assassinated and Tullus Hostilius was consumed by thunderbolts."

These legends of the violent ends of the Roman kings suggest that the contest by which they gained the throne may sometimes have been a mortal combat rather than a race. If that were so, the analogy which we have traced between Rome and Nemi would be still closer. At both places the sacred kings, the living representatives of the godhead, would thus be liable to suffer deposition and death at the hand of any resolute man who could prove his divine right to the holy office by the strong arm and the sharp sword. It would not be surprising if among the early Latins the claim to the kingdom should often have been settled by single combat; for down to historical times the Umbrians regularly submitted their private disputes to the ordeal of battle, and he who cut his adversary's throat was thought thereby to have proved the justice of his cause beyond the reach of cavil.

XV. The Worship of the Oak

THE WORSHIP of the oak tree or of the oak god appears to have been shared by all the branches of the Aryan stock in Europe.

Both Greeks and Italians associated the tree with their highest god, Zeus or Jupiter, the divinity of the sky, the rain, and the thunder.

Perhaps the oldest and certainly one of the most famous sanctuaries in Greece was that of Dodona, where Zeus was revered in the

oracular oak. The thunderstorms which are said to rage at Dodona more frequently than anywhere else in Europe, would render the

spot a fitting home for the god whose voice was heard alike in the rustling of the oak leaves and in the crash of thunder. Perhaps the

bronze gongs which kept up a humming in the wind round the sanctuary were meant to mimick the thunder that might so often be

heard rolling and rumbling in the coombs of the stern and barren mountains which shut in the gloomy valley. In Boeotia, as we have

seen, the sacred marriage of Zeus and Hera, the oak god and the oak goddess, appears to have been celebrated with much pomp

by a religious federation of states. And on Mount Lycaeus in Arcadia the character of Zeus as god both of the oak and of the rain

comes out clearly in the rain charm practised by the priest of Zeus, who dipped an oak branch in a sacred spring. In his latter capac-

ity Zeus was the god to whom the Greeks regularly prayed for rain. Nothing could be more natural; for often, though not always, he

had his seat on the mountains where the clouds gather and the oaks grow. On the Acropolis at Athens there was an image of Earth

praying to Zeus for rain. And in time of drought the Athenians themselves prayed, "Rain, rain, O dear Zeus, on the cornland of the

Athenians and on the plains."

Again, Zeus wielded the thunder and lightning as well as the rain. At Olympia and elsewhere he was worshipped under the surname

of Thunderbolt; and at Athens there was a sacrificial hearth of Lightning Zeus on the city wall, where some priestly officials watched

for lightning over Mount Parnes at certain seasons of the year. Further, spots which had been struck by lightning were regularly

fenced in by the Greeks and consecrated to Zeus the Descender, that is, to the god who came down in the flash from heaven. Altars

were set up within these enclosures and sacrifices offered on them. Several such places are known from inscriptions to have existed

in Athens.

Thus when ancient Greek kings claimed to be descended from Zeus, and even to bear his name, we may reasonably suppose that

they also attempted to exercise his divine functions by making thunder and rain for the good of their people or the terror and confu-

sion of their foes. In this respect the legend of Salmoneus probably reflects the pretensions of a whole class of petty sovereigns who

reigned of old, each over his little canton, in the oak-clad highlands of Greece. Like their kinsmen the Irish kings, they were expected

to be a source of fertility to the land and of fecundity to the cattle; and how could they fulfil these expectations better than by acting

the part of their kinsman Zeus, the great god of the oak, the thunder, and the rain? They personified him, apparently, just as the Ital-

ian kings personified Jupiter.

In ancient Italy every oak was sacred to Jupiter, the Italian counterpart of Zeus; and on the Capitol at Rome the god was worshipped as the deity not merely of the oak, but of the rain and the thunder. Contrasting the piety of the good old times with the scepticism

of an age when nobody thought that heaven was heaven, or cared a fig for Jupiter, a Roman writer tells us that in former days noble matrons used to go with bare feet, streaming hair, and pure minds, up the long Capitoline slope, praying to Jupiter for rain. And straightway, he goes on, it rained bucketsful, then or never, and everybody returned dripping like drowned rats. "But nowadays," says he, "we are no longer religious, so the fields lie baking."

When we pass from Southern to Central Europe we still meet with the great god of the oak and the thunder among the barbarous Aryans who dwelt in the vast primaeval forests. Thus among the Celts of Gaul the Druids esteemed nothing more sacred than the mistletoe and the oak on which it grew; they chose groves of oaks for the scene of their solemn service, and they performed none of their rites without oak leaves. "The Celts," says a Greek writer, "worship Zeus, and the Celtic image of Zeus is a tall oak." The

Celtic conquerors, who settled in Asia in the third century before our era, appear to have carried the worship of the oak with them to their new home; for in the heart of Asia Minor the Galatian senate met in a place which bore the pure Celtic name of Drynemetum, "the sacred oak grove" or "the temple of the oak." Indeed the very name of Druids is believed by good authorities to mean no more than "oak men."

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In the religion of the ancient Germans the veneration for sacred groves seems to have held the foremost place, and according to

Grimm the chief of their holy trees was the oak. It appears to have been especially dedicated to the god of thunder, Donar or Thu-

nar, the equivalent of the Norse Thor; for a sacred oak near Geismar, in Hesse, which Boniface cut down in the eighth century, went

among the heathen by the name of Jupiter's oak (robur Jovis), which in old German would be Donares eih, "the oak of Donar."

That the Teutonic thunder god Donar, Thunar, Thor was identified with the Italian thunder god Jupiter appears from our word

Thursday, Thunar's day, which is merely a rendering of the Latin dies Jovis. Thus among the ancient Teutons, as among the Greeks

and Italians, the god of the oak was also the god of the thunder. Moreover, he was regarded as the great fertilising power, who sent

rain and caused the earth to bear fruit; for Adam of Bremen tells us that "Thor presides in the air; he it is who rules thunder and

lightning, wind and rains, fine weather and crops." In these respects, therefore, the Teutonic thunder god again resembled his south-

ern counterparts Zeus and Jupiter.

Amongst the Slavs also the oak appears to have been the sacred tree of the thunder god Perun, the counterpart of Zeus and Jupiter. It is said that at Novgorod there used to stand an image of Perun in the likeness of a man with a thunder-stone in his hand. A fire

of oak wood burned day and night in his honour; and if ever it went out the attendants paid for their negligence with their lives. Perun seems, like Zeus and Jupiter, to have been the chief god of his people; for Procopius tells us that the Slavs "believe that one god, the maker of lightning, is alone lord of all things, and they sacrifice to him oxen and every victim."

The chief deity of the Lithuanians was Perkunas or Perkuns, the god of thunder and lightning, whose resemblance to Zeus and Jupiter has often been pointed out. Oaks were sacred to him, and when they were cut down by the Christian missionaries, the people loudly complained that their sylvan deities were destroyed. Perpetual fires, kindled with the wood of certain oak-trees, were kept up

in honour of Perkunas; if such a fire went out, it was lighted again by friction of the sacred wood. Men sacrificed to oak-trees for good crops, while women did the same to lime-trees; from which we may infer that they regarded oaks as male and lime-trees as female. And in time of drought, when they wanted rain, they used to sacrifice a black heifer, a black he-goat, and a black cock to the thunder god in the depths of the woods. On such occasions the people assembled in great numbers from the country round about, ate and drank, and called upon Perkunas. They carried a bowl of beer thrice round the fire, then poured the liquor on the flames, while they prayed to the god to send showers. Thus the chief Lithuanian deity presents a close resemblance to Zeus and Jupiter,

since he was the god of the oak, the thunder, and the rain.

From the foregoing survey it appears that a god of the oak, the thunder, and the rain was worshipped of old by all the main branch-

es of the Aryan stock in Europe, and was indeed the chief deity of their pantheon.

XVI. Dianus and Diana

IN THIS CHAPTER I propose to recapitulate the conclusions to which the enquiry has thus far led us, and drawing together the scattered rays of light, to turn them on the dark figure of the priest of Nemi.

We have found that at an early stage of society men, ignorant of the secret processes of nature and of the narrow limits within which it is in our power to control and direct them, have commonly arrogated to themselves functions which in the present state of knowledge we should deem superhuman or divine. The illusion has been fostered and maintained by the same causes which begot it, namely, the marvellous order and uniformity with which nature conducts her operations, the wheels of her great machine revolving with a smoothness and precision which enable the patient observer to anticipate in general the season, if not the very hour, when

they will bring round the fulfilment of his hopes or the accomplishment of his fears. The regularly recurring events of this great

cycle, or rather series of cycles, soon stamp themselves even on the dull mind of the savage. He foresees them, and foreseeing them

mistakes the desired recurrence for an effect of his own will, and the dreaded recurrence for an effect of the will of his enemies.

Thus the springs which set the vast machine in motion, though they lie far beyond our ken, shrouded in a mystery which we can

never hope to penetrate, appear to ignorant man to lie within his reach: he fancies he can touch them and so work by magic art all

manner of good to himself and evil to his foes. In time the fallacy of this belief becomes apparent to him: he discovers that there

are things he cannot do, pleasures which he is unable of himself to procure, pains which even the most potent magician is powerless

to avoid. The unattainable good, the inevitable ill, are now ascribed by him to the action of invisible powers, whose favour is joy and

life, whose anger is misery and death. Thus magic tends to be displaced by religion, and the sorcerer by the priest. At this stage of

thought the ultimate causes of things are conceived to be personal beings, many in number and often discordant in character, who

partake of the nature and even of the frailty of man, though their might is greater than his, and their life far exceeds the span of his

ephemeral existence. Their sharply-marked individualities, their clear-cut outlines have not yet begun, under the powerful solvent of

philosophy, to melt and coalesce into that single unknown substratum of phenomena which, according to the qualities with which

our imagination invests it, goes by one or other of the high-sounding names which the wit of man has devised to hide his ignorance.

Accordingly, so long as men look on their gods as beings akin to themselves and not raised to an unapproachable height above them,

they believe it to be possible for those of their own number who surpass their fellows to attain to the divine rank after death or even

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in life. Incarnate human deities of this latter sort may be said to halt midway between the age of magic and the age of religion. If they bear the names and display the pomp of deities, the powers which they are supposed to wield are commonly those of their

predecessor the magician. Like him, they are expected to guard their people against hostile enchantments, to heal them in sickness, to

bless them with offspring, and to provide them with an abundant supply of food by regulating the weather and performing the other

ceremonies which are deemed necessary to ensure the fertility of the earth and the multiplication of animals. Men who are credited

with powers so lofty and far-reaching naturally hold the highest place in the land, and while the rift between the spiritual and the

temporal spheres has not yet widened too far, they are supreme in civil as well as religious matters: in a word, they are kings as well as

gods. Thus the divinity which hedges a king has its roots deep down in human history, and long ages pass before these are sapped by

a profounder view of nature and man.

In the classical period of Greek and Latin antiquity the reign of kings was for the most part a thing of the past; yet the stories of their lineage, titles, and pretensions suffice to prove that they too claimed to rule by divine right and to exercise superhuman powers. Hence we may without undue temerity assume that the King of the Wood at Nemi, though shorn in later times of his glory and fallen on evil days, represented a long line of sacred kings who had once received not only the homage but the adoration of their subjects in return for the manifold blessings which they were supposed to dispense. What little we know of the functions of Diana

in the Arician grove seems to prove that she was here conceived as a goddess of fertility, and particularly as a divinity of childbirth. It is reasonable, therefore, to suppose that in the discharge of these important duties she was assisted by her priest, the two figuring as King and Queen of the Wood in a solemn marriage, which was intended to make the earth gay with the blossoms of spring and the fruits of autumn, and to gladden the hearts of men and women with healthful offspring.

If the priest of Nemi posed not merely as a king, but as a god of the grove, we have still to ask, What deity in particular did he personate? The answer of antiquity is that he represented Virbius, the consort or lover of Diana. But this does not help us much, for of Virbius we know little more than the name. A clue to the mystery is perhaps supplied by the Vestal fire which burned in the grove. For the perpetual holy fires of the Aryans in Europe appear to have been commonly kindled and fed with oakwood, and

in Rome itself, not many miles from Nemi, the fuel of the Vestal fire consisted of oaken sticks or logs, as has been proved by a microscopic analysis of the charred embers of the Vestal fire, which were discovered by Commendatore G. Boni in the course of the memorable excavations which he conducted in the Roman forum at the end of the nineteenth century. But the ritual of the various Latin towns seems to have been marked by great uniformity; hence it is reasonable to conclude that wherever in Latium a Vestal fire was maintained, it was fed, as at Rome, with wood of the sacred oak. If this was so at Nemi, it becomes probable that the hallowed grove there consisted of a natural oakwood, and that therefore the tree which the King of the Wood had to guard at the peril of

his life was itself an oak; indeed, it was from an evergreen oak, according to Virgil, that Aeneas plucked the Golden Bough. Now the oak was the sacred tree of Jupiter, the supreme god of the Latins. Hence it follows that the King of the Wood, whose life was bound up in a fashion with an oak, personated no less a deity than Jupiter himself. At least the evidence, slight as it is, seems to point to this conclusion. The old Alban dynasty of the Silvii or Woods, with their crown of oak leaves, apparently aped the style and emulated the powers of Latian Jupiter, who dwelt on the top of the Alban Mount. It is not impossible that the King of the Wood, who guarded

the sacred oak a little lower down the mountain, was the lawful successor and representative of this ancient line of the Silvii or Woods. At all events, if I am right in supposing that he passed for a human Jupiter, it would appear that Virbius, with whom legend identified him, was nothing but a local form of Jupiter, considered perhaps in his original aspect as a god of the greenwood.

The hypothesis that in later times at all events the King of the Wood played the part of the oak god Jupiter, is confirmed by an examination of his divine partner Diana. For two distinct lines of argument converge to show that if Diana was a queen of the woods in general, she was at Nemi a goddess of the oak in particular. In the first place, she bore the title of Vesta, and as such presided

over a perpetual fire, which we have seen reason to believe was fed with oak wood. But a goddess of fire is not far removed from a goddess of the fuel which burns in the fire; primitive thought perhaps drew no sharp line of distinction between the blaze and the wood that blazes. In the second place, the nymph Egeria at Nemi appears to have been merely a form of Diana, and Egeria is

definitely said to have been a Dryad, a nymph of the oak. Elsewhere in Italy the goddess had her home on oak-clad mountains. Thus Mount Algidus, a spur of the Alban hills, was covered in antiquity with dark forests of oak, both of the evergreen and the deciduous sort. In winter the snow lay long on these cold hills, and their gloomy oakwoods were believed to be a favourite haunt of Diana, as they have been of brigands in modern times. Again, Mount Tifata, the long abrupt ridge of the Apennines which looks down on the Campanian plain behind Capua, was wooded of old with evergreen oaks, among which Diana had a temple. Here Sulla thanked the goddess for his victory over the Marians in the plain below, attesting his gratitude by inscriptions which were long afterwards to be seen in the temple. On the whole, then, we conclude that at Nemi the King of the Wood personated the oak-god Jupiter and mated with the oak-goddess Diana in the sacred grove. An echo of their mystic union has come down to us in the legend of the loves of Numa and Egeria, who according to some had their trysting-place in these holy woods.

To this theory it may naturally be objected that the divine consort of Jupiter was not Diana but Juno, and that if Diana had a mate at

all he might be expected to bear the name not of Jupiter, but of Dianus or Janus, the latter of these forms being merely a corrup-

tion of the former. All this is true, but the objection may be parried by observing that the two pairs of deities, Jupiter and Juno on

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the one side, and Dianus and Diana, or Janus and Jana, on the other side, are merely duplicates of each other, their names and their functions being in substance and origin identical. With regard to their names, all four of them come from the same Aryan root DI,

meaning "bright," which occurs in the names of the corresponding Greek deities, Zeus and his old female consort Dione. In regard

to their functions, Juno and Diana were both goddesses of fecundity and childbirth, and both were sooner or later identified with

the moon. As to the true nature and functions of Janus the ancients themselves were puzzled; and where they hesitated, it is not for

us confidently to decide. But the view mentioned by Varro that Janus was the god of the sky is supported not only by the etymo-

logical identity of his name with that of the sky-god Jupiter, but also by the relation in which he appears to have stood to Jupiter's

two mates, Juno and Juturna. For the epithet Junonian bestowed on Janus points to a marriage union between the two deities; and

according to one account Janus was the husband of the water-nymph Juturna, who according to others was beloved by Jupiter.

Moreover, Janus, like Jove, was regularly invoked, and commonly spoken of under the title of Father. Indeed, he was identified with

Jupiter not merely by the logic of the learned St. Augustine, but by the piety of a pagan worshipper who dedicated an offering to

Jupiter Dianus. A trace of his relation to the oak may be found in the oakwoods of the Janiculum, the hill on the right bank of the

Tiber, where Janus is said to have reigned as a king in the remotest ages of Italian history.

Thus, if I am right, the same ancient pair of deities was variously known among the Greek and Italian peoples as Zeus and Dione, Jupiter and Juno, or Dianus (Janus) and Diana (Jana), the names of the divinities being identical in substance, though varying in

form with the dialect of the particular tribe which worshipped them. At first, when the peoples dwelt near each other, the difference between the deities would be hardly more than one of name; in other words, it would be almost purely dialectical. But the gradual dispersion of the tribes, and their consequent isolation from each other, would favour the growth of divergent modes of conceiving and worshipping the gods whom they had carried with them from their old home, so that in time discrepancies of myth and ritual would tend to spring up and thereby to convert a nominal into a real distinction between the divinities. Accordingly when, with the slow progress of culture, the long period of barbarism and separation was passing away, and the rising political power of a single strong community had begun to draw or hammer its weaker neighbours into a nation, the confluent peoples would throw their gods, like their dialects, into a common stock; and thus it might come about that the same ancient deities, which their forefathers had worshipped together before the dispersion, would now be so disguised by the accumulated effect of dialectical and religious divergencies that their original identity might fail to be recognised, and they would take their places side by side as independent divinities in the

national pantheon.

This duplication of deities, the result of the final fusion of kindred tribes who had long lived apart, would account for the appear-

ance of Janus beside Jupiter, and of Diana or Jana beside Juno in the Roman religion. At least this appears to be a more probable

theory than the opinion, which has found favour with some modern scholars, that Janus was originally nothing but the god of doors.

That a deity of his dignity and importance, whom the Romans revered as a god of gods and the father of his people, should have

started in life as a humble, though doubtless respectable, doorkeeper appears very unlikely. So lofty an end hardly consorts with so

lowly a beginning. It is more probable that the door (janua) got its name from Janus than that he got his name from it. This view is

strengthened by a consideration of the word janua itself. The regular word for door is the same in all the languages of the Aryan

family from India to Ireland. It is dur in Sanscrit, thura in Greek, tur in German, door in English, dorus in old Irish, and foris in

Latin. Yet besides this ordinary name for door, which the Latins shared with all their Aryan brethren, they had also the name janua,

to which there is no corresponding term in any Indo-European speech. The word has the appearance of being an adjectival form de-

rived from the noun Janus. I conjecture that it may have been customary to set up an image or symbol of Janus at the principal door

of the house in order to place the entrance under the protection of the great god. A door thus guarded might be known as a janua

foris, that is, a Januan door, and the phrase might in time be abridged into janua, the noun foris being understood but not expressed.

From this to the use of janua to designate a door in general, whether guarded by an image of Janus or not, would be an easy and

natural transition.

If there is any truth in this conjecture, it may explain very simply the origin of the double head of Janus, which has so long exercised the ingenuity of mythologists. When it had become customary to guard the entrance of houses and towns by an image of Janus, it might well be deemed necessary to make the sentinel god look both ways, before and behind, at the same time, in order that nothing should escape his vigilant eye. For if the divine watchman always faced in one direction, it is easy to imagine what mischief might

have been wrought with impunity behind his back. This explanation of the double-headed Janus at Rome is confirmed by the dou-

ble-headed idol which the Bush negroes in the interior of Surinam regularly set up as a guardian at the entrance of a village. The idol

consists of a block of wood with a human face rudely carved on each side; it stands under a gateway composed of two uprights and

a cross-bar. Beside the idol generally lies a white rag intended to keep off the devil; and sometimes there is also a stick which seems

to represent a bludgeon or weapon of some sort. Further, from the cross-bar hangs a small log which serves the useful purpose of

knocking on the head any evil spirit who might attempt to pass through the gateway. Clearly this double-headed fetish at the gateway

of the negro villages in Surinam bears a close resemblance to the double-headed images of Janus which, grasping a stick in one hand

and a key in the other, stood sentinel at Roman gates and doorways; and we can hardly doubt that in both cases the heads facing two

ways are to be similarly explained as expressive of the vigilance of the guardian god, who kept his eye on spiritual foes behind and

before, and stood ready to bludgeon them on the spot. We may, therefore, dispense with the tedious and unsatisfactory explanations

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which, if we may trust Ovid, the wily Janus himself fobbed off an anxious Roman enquirer.

To apply these conclusions to the priest of Nemi, we may suppose that as the mate of Diana he represented originally Dianus or Janus rather than Jupiter, but that the difference between these deities was of old merely superficial, going little deeper than the names, and leaving practically unaffected the essential functions of the god as a power of the sky, the thunder, and the oak. It was fitting, therefore, that his human representative at Nemi should dwell, as we have seen reason to believe he did, in an oak grove. His title of King of the Wood clearly indicates the sylvan character of the deity whom he served; and since he could only be assailed

by him who had plucked the bough of a certain tree in the grove, his own life might be said to be bound up with that of the sacred tree. Thus he not only served but embodied the great Aryan god of the oak; and as an oak-god he would mate with the oak-goddess, whether she went by the name of Egeria or Diana. Their union, however consummated, would be deemed essential to the fertility

of the earth and the fecundity of man and beast. Further, as the oak-god was also a god of the sky, the thunder, and the rain, so his human representative would be required, like many other divine kings, to cause the clouds to gather, the thunder to peal, and the

rain to descend in due season, that the fields and orchards might bear fruit and the pastures be covered with luxuriant herbage. The reputed possessor of powers so exalted must have been a very important personage; and the remains of buildings and of votive offerings which have been found on the site of the sanctuary combine with the testimony of classical writers to prove that in later times it was one of the greatest and most popular shrines in Italy. Even in the old days, when the champaign country around was

still parcelled out among the petty tribes who composed the Latin League, the sacred grove is known to have been an object of their

common reverence and care. And just as the kings of Cambodia used to send offerings to the mystic kings of Fire and Water far in

the dim depths of the tropical forest, so, we may well believe, from all sides of the broad Latian plain the eyes and footsteps of Ital-

ian pilgrims turned to the quarter where, standing sharply out against the faint blue line of the Apennines or the deeper blue of the

distant sea, the Alban Mountain rose before them, the home of the mysterious priest of Nemi, the King of the Wood. There, among

the green woods and beside the still waters of the lonely hills, the ancient Aryan worship of the god of the oak, the thunder, and the

dripping sky lingered in its early, almost Druidical form, long after a great political and intellectual revolution had shifted the capital of Latin religion from the forest to the city, from Nemi to Rome.

XVII. The Burden of Royalty

1. Royal and Priestly Taboos

AT A CERTAIN stage of early society the king or priest is often thought to be endowed with supernatural powers or to be an incarnation of a deity, and consistently with this belief the course of nature is supposed to be more or less under his control, and he is held responsible for bad weather, failure of the crops, and similar calamities. To some extent it appears to be assumed that the king's power over nature, like that over his subjects and slaves, is exerted through definite acts of will; and therefore if drought, famine,

pestilence, or storms arise, the people attribute the misfortune to the negligence or guilt of their king, and punish him accordingly

with stripes and bonds, or, if he remains obdurate, with deposition and death. Sometimes, however, the course of nature, while

regarded as dependent on the king, is supposed to be partly independent of his will. His person is considered, if we may express it

so, as the dynamical centre of the universe, from which lines of force radiate to all quarters of the heaven; so that any motion of

his--the turning of his head, the lifting of his hand--instantaneously affects and may seriously disturb some part of nature. He is

the point of support on which hangs the balance of the world, and the slightest irregularity on his part may overthrow the delicate

equipoise. The greatest care must, therefore, be taken both by and of him; and his whole life, down to its minutest details, must be

so regulated that no act of his, voluntary or involuntary, may disarrange or upset the established order of nature. Of this class of monarchs the Mikado or Dairi, the spiritual emperor of Japan, is or rather used to be a typical example. He is an incarnation of the