The Argonautic expedition, when viewed in the light in which it has usually been considered, is an event which a critical historian, if he feels himself compelled to believe it, may think it his duty to notice, but which he is glad to pass rapidly over as a perplexing and unprofitable riddle. For even when the ancient legend has been pared down into a historical form, and its marvellous and poetical features have been all effaced, so that nothing is left but what may appear to belong to its pith and substance, it becomes indeed dry and meagre enough, but not much more intelligible than before. It relates an adventure, incomprehensible in its design, astonishing in its execution, connected with no conceivable cause, and with no sensible effect. The narrative, reduced to the shape in which it has often been thought worthy of a place in history, runs as follows: In the generation before the Trojan war, Jason, a young Thessalian prince, had incurred the jealousy of his kinsman Pelias, who reigned at Iolcus. The crafty king encouraged the adventurous youth to embark in a maritime expedition full of difficulty and danger. It was to be directed to a point far beyond the most remote which Greek navigation had hitherto reached in the same quarter; to the eastern corner of the sea, so celebrated in ancient times for the ferocity of the barbarians inhabiting its coasts, that it was commonly supposed to have derived from them the name of “Axenus,” the inhospitable, before it acquired the opposite name of the “Euxine,” from the civilisation which was at length introduced by Greek settlers. Here, in the land of the Colchians, lay the goal, because this contained the prize, from which the voyage has been frequently called the adventure of the golden fleece. Jason having built a vessel of uncommon size,--in more precise terms, the first 50-oared galley his countrymen had ever launched,--and having manned it with a band of heroes, who assembled from various parts of Greece to share the glory of the enterprise, sailed to Colchis, where he not only succeeded in the principal object of his expedition, whatever this may have been, but carried off Medea, the daughter of the Colchian king, Æetes.