Unto the wod the way he nome, No man wist whor he by come. As distress of mind therefore, appears to have been the cause which rendered "wil of wane" both Sir Ywaine and Wallace's wife, or mistress, (for blind Harry observes it is not worth while to stop and enquire which she was) I am inclined to regard it as a synonymous mode of expression with wil of rede, and that the etymon of wane, is the A. S. "wena, spes, opinio." Will of wane, destitute of hope, would be extremely applicable to the desperate circumstances of the outcast Douglas, and wil of wane, destitute of opinion or judgment, disturbed in thought, equally descriptive of the hurried tide of ideas which would flow upon the mind of an affectionate husband discarded by his wife, or a fond mistress upon discovering the imminent danger of her lover. The affinity between wil of rede, and wil of wane, will probably receive some corroboration, by a recollection, that whenever these phrases are introduced, grief appears to be the most prevalent feeling. Nay, he said, by Saynt Martyne, Ne no wight so wil of wane, I was a man now am i nane. FANDE. Ywaine & Gawin, v. 2112 Than he asked, onone right, What man i was. I said, A knyght, That soght aventurs in that land, My body to asai and fande. Ywaine & Gawin, v. 313. This word is from the Anglo-Saxon "fandian, tentare, probare." In a varied form "founde," Ritson had rightly explained it " endeavour, attempt." ON THE ATYS OF CATULLUS, With a new Translation. FREDERIC WERTHES, who translated the Atys into German, (Munster, 1774,) has a disquisition on the subject, in which he attempts a solution of the fable. "The Earth was worshipped by the old idolaters as the eldest of Gods and the mother of beings. By the Phrygians she was called Cybele. Lucretius (book ii. 598) describes the Earth in a car drawn by lions. She was chiefly worshipped on Mount Ida. The worship of the Sun is of almost parallel antiquity. Like the Earth it was adored by different nations under different titles. Macrobius (Saturn i. c. 21) testifies, that the Phrygians worshipped the Sun by the title of Atys. The Earth is a natural bride for the Sun; and hence the marriage, or love, of Cybele and Atys. Atys is described by Catullus as a beautiful youth; and such a form might have been supposed to conceal Apollo. If we collect all that is related concerning the story of Atys, and especially if we regard his subsequent death in the woods, so far resembling that of Adonis, (the rites of Atys and Adonis were identified by the Phrygians and Lydians,) he would appear to have been one of their kings who passed his whole life in the chase, and who, from his avoiding marriage, came to be described as a eunuch. After his death, no rites seemed so suitable to his deified memory as those of Cybele, who often assumed the person of Diana (the heavenly Earth.) The rites of Cybele were transported into Phrygia by means of the Phoenicians: hence Atys is said to have entered the Phrygian grove, after having been carried over the deeps." It must be owned, that the obscure is here elucidated by greater obscurity. First of all we are to regard Atys as the Sun (which we may indeed fairly admit from his identity with Adonis): but suddenly he becomes a bachelor king, and goes a hunting like a king in a fairy tale :* and after all is conceded as to the astronomical sameness of reference in Atys and Adonis, their mythical history, it must be confest, furnishes no very striking points of resemblance. Adonis is a hunter; but Atys, poor fellow, is rather a huntee; for he flies back to his woods with a lion at his heels. It is not said that "he lived very happy afterwards:" but live he did, and how he died at last is still a secret. In this respect, at least, he had the advantage of Adonis; though it should seem, that the life he led was not quite so pleasant as that of the latter had been. Then with respect to the marriage or love of Atys and Cybele, the German mythologist has here wandered from his text, and has borrowed the common story of Cybele's becoming enamoured of a Phrygian shepherd:† but, judging from the tale as Catullus tells it, were such a wife, or such an amour, the lot of any one of the readers of the MEMORIALIST, he would, I think, be tempted to exclaim Procul à meo sit furor hera! domo. * The commentator perhaps confused his memory with the Atyś, son of Cræsus, the Lydian king, who was killed while hunting the wild boar, notwithstanding the precautions which his father had adopted in consequence of a dream, which thus proved prophetic. -Herodot. i. c. 7. +The sort of loose coincidence between the account of Catullus and that given by Lucian, Ovid, and others, proves that they are only different versions of the same story; and decidedly militates against the conjecture of Mr. Lamb, that the Atys of Catullus was personage of his own creation, and not to be confounded with the Atys of mythology." a " Mr. Leigh Hunt objects to the mystical or metaphy sical character of Atys altogether: which is merely setting up his abstract opinion, as to what most consists with the genius of poetry, against proved facts of mythological record. For this scepticism he gives us a syllogistical reason: this dithyrambic is of Greek extraction; the Greeks had too much taste to employ a double sense in their poems; (the Romans, it seems, had no taste; hear this Tibullus!) therefore, no double sense is enveloped in the Atys. The total absence of positive evidence, the marks of inventive genius distinguishable in the general poetry of Catullus, and the traces of allusion to Roman manners perceivable in this particular poem, embolden us to challenge the proof of the Greek extraction; and if this cannot be shown, what becomes of the syllogism? Mr. Hunt, in consistency with himself, must allow taste to the Greek poet Bion; yet he has bewailed the death of Adonis, and Adonis was a human personification of the sun. But who that reads this tender raving of poetical sorrow thinks about it? The passion of the scene in Sophocles (Trachinia) where Hercules adjures his son to place him on the pile and set it on fire, is not a whit diluted by the knowledge that Hercules also was the sun passing, through his zodiacal round of labours. We are not to look at all this with modern eyes, but should carry ourselves back to the period of living antiquity, when every hero partook of a supernatural character, and every god, and goddess of a human. What, therefore, would be frigid and unimpassioned in a modern poet, should he make choice of some newly personified allegory, is not at all so in a poet of the heathen ages and the critics, who prefer this objection to the mystical character of Atys, overlook this customary association of the human and the metaphysical which gave the tone to classical poetry. We should draw a distinction between the mythological meaning and the poetic use. The objecting to Catullus an allegory of which he never dreamed is frivolous but to contend for the non-existence of any such allegory is to violate the integrity of heathen fable. Catullus knew that his hero was a fabulous non-entity, but it was a non-entity that had been clothed with human existence and human passion: and, as such, he was justified by abundant poetic precedent, and by the popular sympathy always readily yielded to the distresses and adventures of this sort of ambiguous or ideal personages, in converting the sacred fable into an historical monodrama. Mr. Hunt, therefore, appears to give himself very unnecessary trouble in working up the conjecture, that Atys might have been bona fide a young fanatic of the gentile superstition, who, in the heathen decisive way, made a monk of himself. The passion is quite as true, the human interest quite as powerful, as it is. Are we to shut our bosoms to the solitary sorrows of old Saturn, in the gorgeous fragment of Hyperion, because he is, what every body well knows, a personified abstraction of time past? The frenzy of enthusiasm at the opening of the poem, and the contrasted helpless, spiritless, melancholy remorse of sobered reason at the close of it, have been so well delineated by Mr. Hunt, that I do not choose to follow him. I shall venture, however, to make a single critical objection. There is, as it appears to me, a puerility unworthy of the occasion, and of the general elevation of style and invention, in detaching the lion after Atys, with an injunction "not to spare his own |