It is, of course, no argument against this view that the authors of the Dirae regard Gladstone as a maleficent being.  How could they do otherwise?  They were the scribes of the opposed religion.  Diodorus tells us about an Ethiopian sect which detested the Sun.  A parallel, as usual, is found in Egypt, where Set, or Typhon, is commonly regarded as a maleficent spirit, the enemy of Osiris, the midnight sun.  None the less it is certain that under some dynasties Set himself was adored—­the deity of one creed is the Satan of its opponents.  A curious coincidence seems to show (as Bergaigne thinks) that Indra, the chief Indo-Aryan deity, was occasionally confounded with Vrittra, who is usually his antagonist.  The myths of Egypt, as reported by Plutarch, say that Set, or Typhon, forced his way out of his mother’s side, thereby showing his natural malevolence even in the moment of his birth.  The myths of the extinct Algonkins of the American continent repeat absolutely the same tale about Malsumis, the brother and foe of their divine hero, Glooskap.  Now the Rig Veda (iv. 18, 1-3) attributes this act to Indra, and we may infer that Indra had been the Typhon, or Set, or Glooskap, of some Aryan kindred, before he became the chief and beneficent god of the Kusika stock of Indo-Aryans.  The evil myth clung to the good god.  By a similar process we may readily account for the imprecations, and for the many profane and blasphemous legends, in which Gladstone is represented as oblique, mysterious, and equivocal. (Compare Apollo Loxias.) The same class of ideas occurs in the myths about Gladstone “in Opposition” (as the old mythical language runs), that is, about the too ardent sun of summer.  When “in Opposition” he is said to have found himself in a condition “of more freedom and less responsibility,” and to “have made it hot for his enemies,” expressions transparently mythical.  If more evidence were wanted, it would be found in the myth which represents Gladstone as the opponent of Huxley.  As every philologist knows, Huxley, by Grimm’s law, is Huskley, the hero of a “husk myth” (as Ralston styles it), a brilliant being enveloped in a husk, probably the night or the thunder-cloud.  The dispute between Gladstone and Huskley as to what occurred at the Creation is a repetition of the same dispute between Wainamoinen and Joukahainen, in the Kalewala of the Finns.  Released from his husk, the opponent becomes Beaconsfield = the field of light, or radiant sky.

In works of art, Gladstone is represented as armed with an axe.  This, of course, is probably a survival from the effigies of Zeus Labrandeus, den Man auf Munsen mit der streitaxt erblickt (Preller, i. 112).  We hear of axes being offered to Gladstone by his worshippers.  Nor was the old custom of clothing the image of the god (as in the sixth book of the “Iliad”) neglected.  We read that the people of a Scotch manufacturing town, Galashiels, presented the Midlothian Gladstone (a local hero),