DIVI BOTANICI. 185 



proved unfavourable to his virtue, by undermining its supremacy in 

 the economy of mind : it betrayed him into an attempt at injustice 

 and ingratitude. His })ride reminded him that his sister had been 

 given to a hostile stranger, by the man who had desolated the in- 

 heritance of his fathers, and massacred the chiefs of its kingly race. 

 Excited inly by this ungenerous feeling, he conceived a desire to 

 re-demand the princess from her husband, with disregard of her 

 affection for her children and their sire ; and, with a senseless un- 

 concern about consequences, he dispatched his son Paris with a fleet 

 so powerful as to render certain the indulgence of a solicitude alike 

 unwise and unholy. This effeminate adventurer was kindly receiv- 

 ed by the Grecian princes ; but, encouraging an hereditary disposi- 

 tion to selfishness and profligacy, and neglecting the injunctions he 

 was commissioned to execute, he did not perceive depravity in sub- 

 verting the happiness of his august entertainer by an outrage on 

 the rights of hospitality, which are sacred even among savages, 

 on the laws of moral intuition, which are divine and immutable. 

 By a stealthy crime he perpetrated the " Rape of Helen," which 

 kindled the flames of a pitiless warfare ; and, in this, it was the hard 

 fate of Teucer, the son of a Trojan princess, to have his prudence 

 and fortitude exerted for the extermination of a people over whom 

 his progenitors had long exercised a splendid and patriotic sove- 

 reignty. 



When Teucer returned to Salamis from the Trojan expedition, his 

 father would not receive him into his court and family, for the 

 reason that the prince had not avenged the death of his half-brother 

 Ajax,* who was killed in battle. In consequence of this unkind- 

 ness, he repaired to Cyprust where, on acquiring wealth and in- 

 fluence, he built a town, and conferred on it the name of his native 

 island. After the death of Telamon his father, Teucer essayed to 



• When Achilles was slain, Ajax and Ulysses supported opposing claims 

 for the hero's arms; and, on the dispute being submitted to the decision of 

 Menelaus and Agamemnon, the pretensions of Ulj'sscs were preferred. By 

 this award, the son of Telamon was so enraged that he fell into a fit of mani- 

 acal fury ; and, during the paroxysm, he slaughtered a whole flock of sheep, 

 imagining them to be the arbiters who had given him a position of gallantry 

 inferior to that of his rival. This scene affords a melancholy illustration of 

 partial madness occasioned by that disturbance among the mental faculties 

 which awakens the passions of anger and jn'ide. 



+ After the descendants of Teucer had continued to govern the Cyprian 

 Salamis, and to guard the peace and prosperity of its inhabitants for more 

 than eight hundred years, the to\vn was destroyed by an earthquake. It was 

 rebuilt and named Constantia in the fouvtii century. 



