superadded to the principal poetic interest. Danaus, the legend tells, though an Egyptian born, was not of Egyptian descent. The original mother of his race was Io, daughter of Inachus, king of Argos, and priestess of Hera in that place. How this much-persecuted maid found her way from the banks of the "Erasinus old" to the shores of the nurturing Nile, we have seen in the previous piece. Danaus had a brother called Ægyptus, the father of fifty sons, as himself was of fifty daughters. These fifty sons Ægyptus sought to unite in wedlock to the equal-numbered progeny of his brother; but the chaste maidens, whether because they actually thought it unholy (as it certainly is, in the general case, unadvisable) for first cousins to marry first cousins, or {216} because the suit was pressed in a manner not the most respectful, or from a combination of both motives, refused to enter into the bond; and, to escape the importunities of their stronger male suitors, fled, under the guidance of their father, over the seas to Greece. As kind chance, or, rather, Divine Providence, would have it, they were wafted to that very part of Greece whence their famous ancestress Io had originally proceeded, when the god-sent gadfly drove her, in a career of tempestuous wanderings, through great part of Europe and Asia, to Egypt. With their landing on this coast the present opera commences; and the action which it represents is the very simple one of the reception of the Libyan fugitives, by the Argive monarch Pelasgus (otherwise called Gelanor), and their participation in the rights and privileges of Argive citizenship. The transference of their affections from Nile to Erasinus is solemnly sung in the concluding chaunt. The Danaides are now Argives.