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These distinctions may seem over-subtle, but our meaning will surely be plain to anyone who will compare “The Faerie Queen,” or the legend of St. George, with the Gnostic or Hindoo reveries, and the fantastic and truly Eastern interpretation of Scripture, which the European monks borrowed from Egypt. Our opinion is, that in the old legends the moral did not create the story, but the story the moral; and that the story had generally a nucleus of fact within all its distortions and exaggerations. This holds good of the Odinic and Grecian myths; all are now more or less inclined to believe that the deities of Zeus’s or Odin’s dynasties were real conquerors or civilisers of flesh and blood, like the Manco Capac of the Peruvians, and that it was around records of their real victories over barbarous aborigines, and over the brute powers of nature, that extravagant myths grew up, till more civilised generations began to say: “These tales must have some meaning–they must be either allegories or nonsense;” and then fancied that in the remaining thread of fact they found a clue to the mystic sense of the whole.

Such, we suspect, has been the history of St. George and the Dragon, as well as of Apollo and the Python. It is very hard to have to give up the dear old dragon who haunted our nursery dreams, especially when there is no reason for it. We have no patience with antiquaries who tell us that the dragons who guarded princesses were merely “the winding walls or moats of their castles.” What use then, pray, was there in the famous nether garment with which Regnar Lodbrog (shaggy- trousers) choked the dragon who guarded his lady-love? And Regnar was a real piece of flesh and blood, as King AElla and our Saxon forefathers found to their cost; his awful death-dirge, and the effect which it produced, are well known to historians. We cannot give up Regnar’s trousers, for we suspect the key to the whole dragon-question is in the pocket of them.

Seriously, Why should not those dragons have been simply what the Greek word dragon means–what the earliest romances, the Norse myths, and the superstitions of the peasantry in many parts of England to this day assert them to have been–“mighty worms,” huge snakes? All will agree that the Python, the representative in the old world of the Boa-constrictor of the new, lingered in the Homeric age, if not later, both in Greece and in Italy. It existed on the opposite coast of Africa (where it is now extinct) in the time of Regulus; we believe, from the traditions of all nations, that it existed to a far later date in more remote and barbarous parts of Europe. There is every reason to suppose that it still lingered in England after the invasion of the Cymri–say not earlier than B.C. 600–for it was among them an object of worship; and we question whether they would have been likely to have adored a foreign animal, and, as at Abury, built enormous temples in imitation of its windings, and called them by its name.

The only answer to these traditions has as yet been, that no reptile of that bulk is known in cold climates. Yet the Python still lingers in the Hungarian marshes. A few years ago a huge snake, as large as the Pythons of Hindostan, spread havoc among the flocks and terror among the peasantry. Had it been Ariosto’s “Orc,” an a priori argument from science would have had weight. A marsupiate sea- monster is horribly unorthodox; and the dragon, too, has doubtless been made a monster of, but most unjustly: his legs have been patched on by crocodile-slaying crusaders, while his wings–where did they come from? From the traditions of “flying serpents,” which have so strangely haunted the deserts of Upper Egypt from the time of the old Hebrew prophets, and which may not, after all, be such lies as folk fancy. How scientific prigs shook with laughter at the notion of a flying dragon! till one day geology revealed to them, in the Pterodactylus, that a real flying dragon, on the model of Carlo Crivelli’s in Mrs. Jameson’s book, with wings before and legs behind, only more monstrous than that, and than all the dreams of Seba and Aldrovandus (though some of theirs, to be sure, have seven heads), got its living once on a time in this very island of England! But such is the way of this wise world! When Le Vaillant, in the last century, assured the Parisians that he had shot a giraffe at the Cape, he was politely informed that the giraffe was fabulous, extinct–in short, that he lied; and now, behold! the respectable old unicorn (and good Tories ought to rejoice to hear it) has been discovered at last by a German naturalist, Von Muller, in Abyssinia, just where our fathers told us to look for it! And why should we not find the flying serpent too? The interior of Africa is as yet an unknown world of wonders; and we may yet discover there, for aught we know, the descendants of the very satyr who chatted with St. Anthony.