Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: SOLOMON IN EUROPE. [Most of the materials for the history of these legends of Solomon are contained in Kemble's " Salomon and Saturnua " (Ifrio Society); in Hoffmann's paper in the Sitzungsberichte of the Munich Academy, 1871; in Jagic's paper in the " Archiv fur Slavische Philologie," bd. i.; and, for the story of the elopement, above all in Vogt's " Deutsche Dichtungen von Salomon und Markolf," bd. i.] Hamlet, moralizing on the skull of Yorick, exclaims " May not the imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander till he finds it stopping a bung-hole ?" Yet if the bodily change proclaims the hollowness of all earthly fame, perhaps the lesson is more clearly taught by the popular corruptions of that fame itself. Alexander the Great might overlook the desecration of his ashes. It would be harder for him to bear with the mediaeval stories that accuse him of an expedition against Paradise to levy tribute from the angels, and of an inglorious retreat from before the walls. And he is no solitary victim. Virgil was for generations better known as a necromancer than as a poet. The politic Emperor Charlemagne appears in story as a fighting saint, angels and prophecies directing hiswars, his followers forming as it were a noble army of martyrs.. And the subject of the present sketch is the checkered literary career of Solomon, in his wanderings from age to age and from place to place, with the wonderful adventures that have befallen him on the way. We, as a nation, have borne a hand in transforming and distorting his original likeness, so it is only fair that we should grant him a little tardy sympathy. But before proceeding to the Solomon of legend, we must recall the Solomon of history. For no matter what mad pranks tradition may play with men and events, one thing must never be...