Beneath the surface of brilliant social culture lurked gross appetites and savage passions, unrestrained by medieval piety, untutored by modern experience.
Too well-informed, too appreciative and too modest to deem himself the peer of the "grand old masters," or one of "those far stars that come in sight once in a century," he made it his aim to write something that should "make a purer faith and manhood shine in the untutored heart," and to do this in the way that should best reach that heart.
But these, to the untutored imagination, present a mystical, as well as a mechanical aspect; and barbaric familiarity with the heavens developed at an early age, through the promptings of superstition, into a fixed system of observation.
Such myths might spring up anywhere among untutored men, and anywhere might survive into civilized literature.
These correspond to the chief problems which the world presents to the curiosity of untutored men.