aeus remains to be considered--the
mythological or geographical. Is it not a wonderful thing that a few
pages of one of Plato's dialogues have grown into a great legend, not
confined to Greece only, but spreading far and wide over the nations of
Europe and reaching even to Egypt and Asia? Like the tale of Troy,
or the legend of the Ten Tribes (Ewald, Hist. of Isr.), which perhaps
originated in a few verses of II Esdras, it has become famous, because
it has coincided with a great historical fact. Like the romance of King
Arthur, which has had so great a charm, it has found a way over the seas
from one country and language to another. It inspired the navigators of
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; it foreshadowed the discovery of
America. It realized the fiction so natural to the human mind, because
it answered the enquiry about the origin of the arts, that there had
somewhere existed an ancient primitive civilization. It might find a
place wherever men chose to look for it; in North, South, East, or
West; in the Islands of the Blest; before the entrance of the Straits
of Gibraltar, in Sweden or in Palestine. It mattered little whether the
description in Plato agreed with the locality assigned to it or not. It
was a legend so adapted to the human mind that it made a habitation for
itself in any country. It was an island in the clouds, which might be
seen anywhere by the eye of faith. It was a subject especially congenial
to the ponderous industry of certain French and Swedish writers, who
delighted in heaping up learning of all sorts but were incapable of
using it.

M. Martin has written a valuable dissertation on the opinions
entertained respecting the Island of Atlantis in ancient and modern
times. It is a curious chapter in the history of the human mind. The
tale of Atlantis is the fabric of a vision, but it has never ceased to
interest mankind. It was variously regarded by the ancients themselves.
The stronger heads among them, like Strabo and Longinus, were as little
disposed to believe in the truth of it as the modern reader in Gulliver
or Robinson Crusoe. On the other hand there is no kind or degree of
absurdity or fancy in which the more foolish writers, both of
antiquity and of modern times, have not indulged respecting it. The
Neo-Platonists, loyal to their master, like some commentators on the
Christian Scriptures, sought to give an allegorical meaning to what they
also believed to be an historical fact. I