, when I sought with joy
The vow'd destruction of ungrateful Troy."

Dryden's Virgil, v. 1058.

268 --_On Polydore._ Euripides, Virgil, and others, relate that Polydore
was sent into Thrace, to the house of Polymestor, for protection,
being the youngest of Priam's sons, and that he was treacherously
murdered by his host for the sake of the treasure sent with him.

269 "Perhaps the boldest excursion of Homer into this region of poetical
fancy is the collision into which, in the twenty-first of the Iliad,
he has brought the river god Scamander, first with Achilles, and
afterwards with Vulcan, when summoned by Juno to the hero's aid. The
overwhelming fury of the stream finds the natural interpretation in
the character of the mountain torrents of Greece and Asia Minor.
Their wide, shingly beds are in summer comparatively dry, so as to
be easily forded by the foot passenger. But a thunder-shower in the
mountains, unobserved perhaps by the traveller on the plain, may
suddenly immerse him in the flood of a mighty river. The rescue of
Achilles by the fiery arms of Vulcan scarcely admits of the same
ready explanation from physical causes. Yet the subsiding of the
flood at the critical moment when the hero's destruction appeared
imminent, might, by a slight extension of the figurative parallel,
be ascribed to a god symbolic of the influences opposed to all
atmospheric moisture."--Mure, vol. i. p. 480, sq.

270 Wood has observed, that "the circumstance of a falling tree, which
is described as reaching from one of its banks to the other, affords
a very just idea of the breadth of the Scamander."

271 --_Ignominious._ Drowning, as compared with a death in the field of
battle, was considered utterly disgraceful.

272 --_Beneath a caldron._

"So, when with crackling flames a caldron fries,
The bubbling waters from the bottom rise.
Above the brims they force their fiery way;
Black vapours climb aloft, and cloud the day."

Dryden's Virgil, vii. 644.

273 "This tale of the temporary servitude of particular gods, by order
of Jove, as a punishment for misbehaviour, recurs not unfrequently
among the incidents of the Mythical world."--Grote, vol. i. p.