]84 "IVI BOTANICI. 



aclinowledgmcnt of the help he had received from heaven. For 

 this impiety, his territories were laid waste by inundations of the 

 sea, and his people suftered grievously from an epidemical pestilence. 

 Penitential sacrifices were then ostentatiously offered by the royal 

 transgressor ; but, like the constrained abasements too often dis- 

 played by a justly chastised hypocrisj^, ihey added mockery to the 

 guilt of perfidiousness : they proved unavailing, and the calamities 

 of his devoted nation increased. He was overmastered by the forces 

 of an assailant* from the ocean, who demanded the annual tribute 

 of a marriageable virgin, as the evidence of her people's subjuga- 

 tion to his power. For several years, this odious exaction had been 

 endured, when the lot determined that Hesione, the king's daugh- 

 ter, should be the next victim. This fatal decision overwhelmed 

 licr hapless parent with consternation and wretchedness ; and while 

 with a natural reluctance he was hesitating to resign his tenderly 

 beloved child to a destiny so cruel, he accepted the proffered aid of 

 Hercules to liberate her country, and to punish its inexorable op- 

 pressor, engaging to recompense her deliverer with a stipulated 

 number of the finest Trojan horses. Without delay the lady's he- 

 roic champion fulfilled his engagements, by achieving the monster's 

 destruction ; but, with the infatuation of a deceiver foredoomed to 

 ruin, the false-hearted father refused to observe his part of the so 

 Icmn compact, b_y withholding from his chivalrous ally the meed so 

 entirely due to the saviour of his people from an intolerable degra- 

 dation. Incensed most reasonably by the king's baseness, the ill-re- 

 quited hero enforced his rightful claims by turning his power 

 against the Trojan city which he captured, on the discomfiture of 

 its army. He then put the insincere monarch to death, and esta- 

 blished his son Priam on the dishonoured throne ; and, having 

 gained the princess Hesione among the spoils of war, he bestowed 

 lier on Telamon his trusty associate, who made her his queen, to 

 sliare with himself the homage of his faithful Salaminian islanders. 

 Priam entered, with persevering energy, on the restoration of the 

 Trojan metropolis, and he soon made it the admiration of many na- 

 tions, for its extraordinary strength and beauty. But his prosperity 



* With the poets this savage enslaver of the Laomedontiadse is mysti- 

 cally pourtrayed under the symbol of a sea-monster, by whom the destined 

 Trojan maidens were mercilessly devoured. When divested of his emblema- 

 tic horrors, this monster would be a barbarian pirate or " reafcrc," like the 

 brutal Scandinavian " Sc-kingr," who were long formidable to islanders and 

 dwellers on the sea-shore, from the sternness of their valour and the ferocity 

 of tlicir vengeance. 



