We now come to those sacred festivals in celebration of religious mysteries, which inspire modern times with so earnest an interest.
Perhaps no subject connected with the religion of the ancients has been cultivated with more laborious erudition, attended with more barren result.

And with equal truth and wit, the acute and searching Lobeck has compared the schools of Warburton and St.Croix to the Sabines, who possessed the faculty of dreaming what they wished.
According to an ancient and still popular account, the dark enigmas of Eleusis were borrowed from Egypt;--the drama of the Anaglyph [45].
But, in answer to this theory, we must observe, that even if really, at their commencement, the strange and solemn rites which they are asserted to have been--mystical ceremonies grow so naturally out of the connexion between the awful and the unknown--were found so generally among the savages of the ancient world--howsoever dispersed -- and still so frequently meet the traveller on shores to which it is indeed a wild speculation to assert that the oriental wisdom ever wandered, that it is more likely that they were the offspring of the native ignorance [46], than the sublime importation of a symbolical philosophy utterly ungenial to the tribes to which it was communicated, and the times to which the institution is referred.

And though I would assign to the Eleusinian Mysteries a much earlier date than Lobeck is inclined to affix [47], I search in vain for a more probable supposition of the causes of their origin than that which he suggests, and which I now place before the reader.

We have seen that each Grecian state had its peculiar and favourite deities, propitiated by varying ceremonies.

The early Greeks imagined that their gods might be won from them by the more earnest prayers and the more splendid offerings of their neighbours; the Homeric heroes found their claim for divine protection on the number of the offerings they have rendered to the deity they implore.