This is an early and rude specimen of an errant knight; the same character which was afterwards expanded into Roland and Launcelot, the paladins and peers of Charlemagne and Arthur, worthies closely allied to the heroes of Homer and Hesiod. The triple–bodied Geryon, the Nemean lion and Lernæan hydra, the deliverance of Andromeda by Perseus, the capture of the golden fleece, and above all, perhaps, Amycus, who compelled all strangers to box with him, till he was beaten by Pollux, and bound by oath to renounce the practice, are entirely in unison with the spirit and imagery of chivalric romance. Examples to this effect might easily be multiplied. But an essay on the fictions of the Greeks would be foreign to the scope of this publication: and it would be absurd to enter upon a critical investigation of a series of stories, extended by some chronologers over seven centuries, from the foundation of Argos to the Trojan war, while Newton contracts them within a century and a half, which tell of little but bloodshed, abductions, and violence of all sorts, intermixed, however, with notices of those who invented the useful arts and fostered the gradual progress of civilization. As we approach to the Trojan war, a sort of twilight history begins to dawn upon us. It is to what may seem at first the strongholds of fiction, to the exploits of Hercules and Theseus, that we refer. The earliest ascertained fact is the establishment of a regular government by Minos, who also cleared the sea from pirates. At no long interval the above–named heroes made another step in civilization; they cleared the land from rapine, as Minos had cleared the sea. Other men, roaming in search of adventures, had carried bloodshed through the land at the suggestion of their passions or for the advancement of their fame; but Hercules first traversed the earth with the express design of avenging the oppressed and exterminating their oppressors, and the example was soon after followed by his kinsman Theseus. Their exploits, of course, are chiefly fabulous: but it is worthy of observation that those of Theseus approach much nearer to probability than the far–famed labours of Hercules. Indeed the history of the former presents this peculiarity, that the accounts of his youth are consistent, and scarcely improbable, while those of his age run into all the extravagance of romance. Theseus, travelling from Trœzen to Athens, was strongly urged to go by sea, the way by land being beset with robbers and murderers. He refused to do so, being inflamed with emulation of Hercules’ renown; and on the journey signalized himself by slaying Sinnis, surnamed the Pine–bender, because he dismembered travellers by tying them to the tops of trees forcibly brought together and then allowed to start asunder; Procrustes, who exhibited a passion for uniformity worthy a German general of the old school, in reducing all men to the measure of his own bed, by