3. Though Mr. Clinton does not carry out consistently either of his disfranchising qualifications among the names and persons of the old mythes, he nevertheless presses them far enough to strike out a sensible proportion of the whole. By conceding thus much to modern scepticism, he has departed from the point of view of Hellanikus and Herodotus, and the ancient historians generally; and it is singular that the names, which he has been the most forward to sacrifice, are exactly those to which they were most attached, and which it would have been most painful to their faith to part with,—I mean the eponymous heroes. Neither Herodotus, nor Hellanikus, nor Eratosthenês, nor any one of the chronological reckoners of antiquity, would have admitted the distinction which Mr. Clinton draws between persons real and persons fictitious in the old mythical world, though they might perhaps occasionally, on special grounds, call in question the existence of some individual characters amongst the mythical ancestry of Greece; but they never dreamed of that general severance into real and fictitious persons, which forms the principle of Mr. Clinton’s “middle course.” Their chronological computations for Grecian antiquity assumed that the mythical characters, in their full and entire sequence, were all real persons. Setting up the entire list as real, they calculated so many generations to a century, and thus determined the number of centuries which separated themselves from the gods, the heroes, or the autochthonous men who formed in their view the historical starting point. But as soon as it is admitted that the personages in the mythical world are divisible into two classes, partly real and partly fictitious, the integrity of the series is broken up, and it can be no longer employed as a basis for chronological calculation. In the estimate of the ancient chronologers, three succeeding persons of the same lineage—grandfather, father, and son,—counted for a century; and this may pass in a rough way, so long as you are thoroughly satisfied that they are all real persons: but if, in the succession of persons A, B, C, you strike out B as a fiction, the continuity of data necessary for chronological computation disappears. Now Mr. Clinton is inconsistent with himself in this,—that, while he abandons the unsuspecting historical faith of the Grecian chronologers, he nevertheless continues his chronological computations upon the data of that ancient faith,—upon the assumed reality of all the persons constituting his ante-historical generations. What becomes, for example, of the Herakleid genealogy of the Spartan kings, when it is admitted that eponymous persons are to be cancelled as fictions; seeing that Hyllus, through whom those kings traced their origin to Hêraklês comes in the most distinct manner under that category, as much so as Hoplês the son of Iôn? It will be found that, when we once cease to believe in the mythical world as an uninterrupted and