“In this temple, two Herculeses are worshipped without having statues erected to them. The Egyptian Hercules has two brazen altars without inscriptions, the Theban but one. Here we saw engraved in stone the Hydra, and Diomedes’ mares, and the twelve labours of Hercules, together with the golden olive of Pygmalion, wrought with exquisite skill, and placed here no less on account of the beauty of its branches, than on that of its fruit, of emeralds, which appeared as if real. Besides the above, the golden belt of the Telamonian Teucer was shown to us.... The Pillars in the temple were composed of gold and silver; and so nicely blended were the metals as to form but one colour. They were more than a cubit high, of a quadrangular form, like anvils, whose capitals were inscribed with characters _neither Egyptian, nor Indian_, nor such as could be deciphered. These Pillars are the chains which bind together the earth and sea. The inscriptions on them were executed by Hercules in the house of the Parcæ, to prevent discord arising among the elements, and that friendship being interrupted which they have for each other.”[16] There was no Hercules, but the Tyrian worshipped here. The temple was Tyrian, the rites were Tyrian, and the Tyrians did not borrow from the Greeks. What I say is but the repetition of what Appian, Arrian[17] and others have said. In fact, there was but one Hercules. The writing could only be Phœnician. By the testimony of Greek travellers, the pillars were _square stones_; and the tradition of their being the links which bind together the earth and the sea, again connects these with the occasion upon which they were erected: they were both in Europe.[18] To call Calpe and Abyla “The Pillars of Hercules” was a license, and might be a poetic one; but to assume these mountains to be so geographically, was to withdraw the license by destroying the poetry. This solecism modern philosophy has adopted![19] Out of this error arose the dull plagiarism of the Bœotian Charles, who gave to the presumptuous arms, in which those of the Peninsula were quartered with those of the Empire, two Pillars as supporters, which are to stand for the traditional altars and the figurative hills. The motto was “plus ultra,” taken from “ne plus ultra,” both equally meaningless after the discovery of America. The dropping of the particle _ne_ announced the unlimited ambition of his nature, and the narrow limits of his mind and scholarship.[20]