made them drunk, till they tempered them by mixing them with water-fish. A little farther on too they meet with vines, the stems of which grow into the bodies of women, like the representations in pictures of Daphne half-transformed, with branches growing from the ends of their fingers, and their heads covered instead of hair with tendrils, leaves, and clusters.

After a misadventure which makes them return hastily to their ship, they set sail, and are attacked by a storm still more terrible than the former, for they are carried up into the air at least three thousand stadia, and are driven along as if in a balloon. “And having sailed in the air seven days and seven nights, on the eighth we see a certain great land in the air, like an island, shining and globular, and illuminated with a great light; and having brought our vessel to it, and come to an anchor, we disembarked. Upon looking over the country, we found it to be inhabited and cultivated. In the day, therefore, we saw nothing thence, but when night came on, there appeared to us other islands in the neighbourhood, some greater and some less, in their colour like fire; and some other earth below, which had cities in it, and rivers, and seas, and woods, and mountains. This, therefore, we conjectured to be the earth which we inhabit." It is probable that Lucian intended to ridicule the philosophers, who believed the Moon to be an inhabited world. We must go on, however, with his account of it. The unfortunate travellers are apprehended by the Hippogyps. These are men riding on enormous vultures, generally with three heads, and with quills longer and thicker than the mast of a merchant vessel. This very efficient horsepatrol, having met with the strangers in their circuit round the lunar world, carry them into the presence of their king.

Endymion was engaged in a war with Phaethon, the sovereign of the Sun, in consequence of an attempt to colonize the Morning Star. The strangers attend him into the field; and an account follows of the number, equipment, and disposition of the forces. Lucian seems to have had his eye on similar descriptions in Herodotus, the account of the various nations which composed the army of Xerxes, and of their different arms, and the statement of the numbers and arrangement of the Grecian troops before the battle of Platea. The phraseology, and a slight touch of the Ionic dialect, betray the allusion; and there is something truly oriental in the familiarity with which he speaks of tens of thousands in all possible multiples, and in the long and sounding names of the Hippogypi, the Cenchroboli, the Scorodomachi, the Psyleotoxotæ, the Anemodromi, the Strathobalani, and the Hippogerani; these are all various species of flying cavalry. In such a war it might be supposed that there would be little opportunity for the operations of infantry; but this diffi

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culty is obviated; for spiders, each of which is much bigger than any of the Cyclades, weave a spacious web between the Moon and the Morning Star, which serves as a field of battle. Victory declared at first for the armies of the Moon; and of the enemy, many were taken alive, and many were killed; and the blood flowed, much of it on the clouds, so that they were stained, and appeared red, such as are seen among us at sun-set, and much also dropped upon the earth; so that I conjectured, that it was perhaps in consequence of the occurrence of some such event long ago in the upper regions, that Homer supposed that Jupiter rained blood on occasion of the death of Sarpedon*." Just, however, as they had erected their trophies, the face of affairs is changed by the arrival of certain formidable allies of the people of the Sun, the Nephelocentauri, who are evidently the decendants of Ixion. Endymion and his forces are defeated with great loss; and, amongst the prisoners, are Lucian and two of his companions. The victors begin to build a great wall between the Sun and Moon, in the style of the lines thrown up in the military operations of antiquity, so as to involve the latter in a perpetual eclipse. Endymion is thus compelled to sue for peace; and the treaty is given in the form of those reported by Thucydides, as follows:

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8

Upon these terms the Sunnites and their allies made fan agreement with the Moonites and heir allies: that the Sunnites should take down the wall which they have interposed, and no longer make incursions into the Moon, but restore the prisoners also, each at an appointed ransom; and that the Moonites should leave the other Stars to be governed by their own laws, and not wage war against the Sunnites, but that they should be allies to one another if any one attack them; and that the king of the Moonites should pay tribute every year to the king of the Sunnites, ten thousand jars of dew; and that they should give of themselves ten thousand hostages, and make the colony sent to the Morning Star common; and that any one else who chose might take part in it; and that they should engrave the treaty upon a pillar of amber, and set it up in the middle of the air upon the boundaries: and there swore, of the Sunnites, Pyronides, and Therites, and Phlogius; of the Moonites, Nyctor, and Menius, and Polylampes."

Upon the return of Lucian and his companions, Endymion endeavours in vain to persuade them to stay with him, and at last dismisses them with handsome presents. Before, however, we leave the Moon, we must notice some peculiarities of its inhabitants. One might almost imagine that Lucian intended to ridi

* Iliad II. 459.

cule those unhappy individuals, who are compelled, under pain of blindness, to walk about the world with a pair of spectacles on their noses; for he describes the Moonites as endowed with eyes, which they take out and keep in their pockets till they want them, and then put them in and see. Those who are unfortunate enough to lose their own, are obliged to borrow from their friends; and the rich have frequently several spare eyes, which they lay by. From his describing the Moonites as vanishing into air when they grow old, instead of dying, we might be tempted to conjecture that he had met with some disquisitions of the Jewish doctors on the mode in which mankind would have been translated if they had remained in Paradise; and he clearly intends to ridicule some unlucky traveller, who had given too faithful an account of some animal of the opossum tribe, where he says that they use their bellies as a pouch, opening them, and putting in whatever they choose, and that their little ones, when they are cold, creep into them.

The last wonder which he describes is a mirror, which is placed over a well not very deep. "If then any one goes down into the well, he hears every thing that is said amongst us upon the earth; and if he looks into the mirror, he sees all cities and all nations, as if he were standing over each. Then I saw my family also, and all my country; but whether they too saw me I cannot yet tell with certainty. But whosoever does not believe that these things are thus, if ever he himself should come thither, he will know that I tell truth."

In their voyage from the Moon into the ocean they arrive at a very singular place, Lychnopolis, or the City of Lamps. It is not easy to understand the aim of Lucian's satire in this fiction; unless perhaps he intended to ridicule those philosophers who held that the soul of man was of the nature of fire, and after death ascended to the sphere of Æther, the purest and highest of the elements. "When we disembarked, we found no men, but many lamps running about, and spending their time in the forum and about the port; some of them little, and as one may say, poor; but a few of the great and powerful very bright and shining. And there had been habitations made for them, and lanterns for each individually; and they had names like men; and we heard them uttering voices; and they did us no harm, but even invited us to partake of their hospitality; but nevertheless we were afraid, and none of us ventured to take either food or sleep. Their public buildings are erected in the middle of the city, where their governor sits all night long, calling each by his name; and whosoever does not answer is condemned to die, as having deserted his post; and their death is to be extinguished

***

Here I recognised our lamp also; and having

addressed him, I inquired about matters at home, how they were, and he told me every thing." On the next day they sail near the clouds, and see at a little distance the city of Nephelococcygia; upon which Lucian takes occasion to vindicate the veracity of Aristophanes; and in a day or two, as the wind subsides, they descend gently upon the sea.

Our travellers seem always to be delivered from one adventure only to meet with another still more wonderful and perilous. On the second day after their return to the ocean, they are swallowed, ship and all, by an enormous sea monster. It is not difficult to conjecture the story against which the ridicule of Lucian is here directed. This part of the narrative is drawn out to a tedious length. The inside of the fish seems to be quite an inhabited and cultivated country. Besides various tribes, who may be considered as Aborigines, they find an old man and his son, who are the survivors of a crew which had been swallowed in the same manner as themselves. With their assistance they kill the monster by burning the forests which grow within him, and make their escape. Even during their residence in the fish they are not quite shut out from the light of heaven; for the beast very graciously gapes once every hour.

During some of these yawns, they are witnesses to a sea-fight between two nations of men half a stadium in height, and sailing in floating islands. The end of the description is perhaps worth transcribing. Our readers will remember the Leviathan of Milton:

Him, haply slumbering on the Norway foam,
The pilot of some small night-foundered skiff
Deeming some island, oft as seamen tell,
With fixed anchor in his scaly rind,

Moors by his side under the lee, while night
Invests the sea, and wished morn delays.

But this is nothing compared to the use made of the Leviathan of Lucian. The victorious party" erected a trophy of their island engagement, by suspending one of the enemy's islands to a wooden post upon the head of the monster. And that night they lodged round about the beast, having made fast their halsers to him, and lying at anchor close by him; for they use anchors also of great size and strength, made of glass. And the next day they sacrificed upon the monster, and buried their own men upon him, and sailed away."

In the Second Book of the History upon which we are now entering, there is a richer fancy and more refined wit than in the first part. Lucian, like all professed deriders of the marvellous, seems to have disbelieved much that was really true. If Captain

Parry's voyage had been performed in his age, the adventurous navigator would have fared no better than Ctesias or Iambulus. His mirth has evidently been excited by some account of the Northern Ocean; for soon after his escape from the monster, the sea is suddenly frozen round the vessel, and they live for thirty days in a cave in the ice, and subsist upon the fish which they dig up. Afterwards they meet, not indeed with "seas of milk and ships of amber," but with seas of milk and islands of cheese; and fall in with the Phellopodes, a nation of men with cork feet, skimming fearlessly over the surface of the water. Right a head, at the distance of about five hundred stadia, lay a low flat island. "And now we were near it, and a wonderful air breathed round about us, such as the historian Herodotus says is exhaled from the Happy Arabia; for a scent struck upon our senses, as fragrant as if it flowed from the rose and the narcissus and the hyacinth, and lilies and violets, and the myrtle besides, and the laurel, and the blossoming vine." Milton has seized the same image, and particularized and dilated it with his peculiar beauty and sublimity:

As when to them who sail

Beyond the Cape of Hope, and now are past
Mozambic, off at sea north-east winds blow

Sabæan odours from the spicy shore

Of Araby the Blest; with such delay

Well pleased they slack their course, and many a league
Cheered with the grateful smell old Ocean smiles.

By this sweet scent they are allured to approach more closely to the island. "There we saw on every side of it many spacious harbours, in which the water was perfectly smooth, and rivers as clear as crystal flowing gently into the sea, and meadows besides, and woods, and singing birds, some warbling on the shores, and many upon the branches. And a light and pure air was diffused over the country; and the woods waved gently with the fragrant gales breathing through them; and as the branches moved, a sweet continuous melody whispered from them, like the sound of flutes in the solitary fields." They land; but as they are advancing through a flowery meadow, they are seized by a guard, bound with garlands of roses, and led into the presence of the sovereign of the country. They find now that they are in the Island of the Blessed, and that they are to appear before Rhadamanthus. They arrive just as Ajax is condemned to be put into the hands of Hippocrates to be dosed with hellebore, and not to be re-admitted to the immortal banquet till he has recovered his senses. other causes are heard; and at last they are called to give an account of themselves. They relate their history, and Rhadamanthus is much perplexed by the arrival of living men in this abode

Some