Page:Star Lore Of All Ages, 1911.pdf/357

Rh upon the shore with the dried tendons stretched across it.

Blake offers the following explanation of the connection of this figure with the tortoise: "At the probable time when the name of the constellation was composed, and the figure invented, Vega, the chief star in the constellation, may have been very near the Pole of the heavens, and therefore have had a slow motion, and hence it might have been named 'the Tortoise,' and this in Greek would easily be interpreted into Lyre."

This double meaning of the word seems certainly to have given rise to the fable of Mercury having constructed a lyre out of the back of a tortoise.

There was also a notion that the Lyre was placed in the sky near Hercules for the alleviation of his toil. There is the following interesting note on the Lyre by Burritt:

"The lyre was a famous stringed instrument much used by the ancients, said to have been invented by Mercury about the year of the world 2000, though some ascribe the invention to Jubal. It is universally allowed that the lyre was the first instrument of the stringed kind used in Greece. The different lyres at various periods of time had from four to eighteen strings each. The modern lyre is the Welsh harp. The lyre among painters is an attribute of Apollo and the Muses."

Emphasis seems to be laid on the mystic number seven in this constellation, as in the stars of Ursa Major, and the Pleiades, for the Lyre was mentioned by Ovid as having seven strings. Our Longfellow thus sings of it:

In Bohemia our Lyre was "the Fiddle in the Sky." The ancient Britons called it "King Arthur's Harp," and the