“The two pieces of money signify Moses and Aaron, through whose mediation the Hebrews were brought out of Egypt.

“2.—­The cat denotes the Assyrians, by whom the ten tribes were carried into captivity.

“3.—­The dog is symbolical of the Babylonians.

“4.—­The staff signifies the Persians.

“5.—­The fire indicates the Grecian empire under Alexander the Great.

“6.—­The water betokens the Roman, or the fourth of the great monarchies to whose dominion the Jews were subjected.

“7—–­ The ox is a symbol of the Saracens, who subdued Palestine, and brought it under the caliphate.

“8.—­The butcher that killed the ox denotes the Crusaders, by whom the Holy Land was wrested out of the hands of the Saracens.

“9.—­The angel of death signifies the Turkish power, by which the land of Palestine was taken from the Franks, and to which it is still subject.

“10.—­The commencement of the tenth stanza is designed to show that God will take signal vengeance on the Turks, immediately after whose overthrow the Jews are to be restored to their own land, and live under the government of their long-expected Messiah.”

To return to illustrations less remote, and of a more familiar nature:—­

An ill-bred.  Londoner calls a shilling a hog, and half-a-crown a bull.  He little knows what havoc he is making with our modern theorists, who assert that nothing is worthy of belief, or ought to be relied upon, before the era of “legitimate” or written “history.”  These terms corroborate and identify themselves with the most ancient of traditionary customs, long ere princes had monopolised the surface of coined money with their own images and superscriptions.  They are identical with the very name of money among the early Romans, which was pecunia, from pecus, a flock.  Among the same people, it is well known, the word stipulatio signified the striking of a bargain, which was done by placing two straws, stipes, one across the other.  The same mode is practised to this day in the Isle of Man, existing, in all probability, from a period earlier than the foundation of Rome itself.  Is the coincidence accidental or traditional?  If the latter, what a history it tells of the migration of the species!

How much might be written of amulets, cups, and horns of magical power, from the divining cup of Genesis to the Amalthean horns, and the goblet of Oberon, which he gave to Huon of Bordeaux, the supernatural power of which, passing into an hundred shapes of fiction, may be found in our baronial halls—­a pledge, to a certain extent, like the invulnerability of Achilles, of the good fortune of its possessor.  It is wonderful that Shakespeare, who is so happy in the verisimilitude of his fairy lore, and so apt to embellish his plot with its mythology, should not have thought of causing the king-making Earl of Warwick to lose the horn of that prodigious cow—­no