the midnight sun
Just as our glorious mythical Bismarck has been falsely interpreted as the shadowy traditional Arminius -LRB- the Arminius of Tacitus , not of Leo Adolescens -RRB- , projected on the mists of the Brocken , so Gladstone has been recognized as a human hero of the Fourth Dynasty . In this capacity he has been identified with Gordon -LRB- probably the north wind -RRB- , with Spurgeon , -LCB- 284 -RCB- whom I have elsewhere shown to be a river god , and with Livingstone . In the last case the identity of the suffix `` stone , '' and the resemblance of the ideas of `` joy '' and of `` vitality , '' lend some air of speciousness to a fundamental error . Livingstone is ohne zweifel , a mythical form of the midnight sun , now fabled to wander in the `` Dark Continent , '' as Bishop of Natal , the land of the sun 's birthplace , now alluded to as lost in the cloud-land of comparative mythology . Of all these cobwebs spun by the spiders of sciolism , the Euhemeristic or Spencerian view -- that Gladstone is an historical personage -- has attracted most attention . Unluckily for its advocates , the whole contemporary documents of the Victorian Dynasty have perished . When an over-educated and over-rated populace , headed by two mythical figures , Wat Tyler and one Jo , -LCB- 285a -RCB- rose in fury against the School Boards and the Department , they left nothing but tattered fragments of the literature of the time .