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OF THE PHONETIC ALPHABET 79 
voked an armament of subjects and allies, and undertook the memo- 
rable expedition to Troy,*° which, if it be only a flight of imagina- 
tion, has inspired the youth and warmed the age of succeeding 
generations. Prior to this celebrated armada, the expedition of 
Jason27 and his colleagues in quest of the golden fleece has been 
handed down to us in song and tradition, and was probably founded 
on a mercantile enterprize of some importance from Greece to the 
Euxine Sea, which would rival, in the estimation of contemporaries, 
the once-thought-eutopian voyage of Columbus. * ® 
Nor was the maritime spirit of the primitive Greeks depressed by 
civil or religious regulations of a character to circumscribe its first 
adventurous essays. Unlike the embodied hierarchy of Egypt,*° 
which held down a single people under a single crosier, their reli- 
gion was exercised with independent and paternal] piety in the petty 
tribes that occupied the mountain and the valley, uncontrouled by the 
rod of magic or the sceptre of despotism. The most daring and 
most fortunate hero directed the destinies of his tribe, and discharg- 
ed the patriarchal functions of priest and parent with the common 
approbation of his people ; and this primitive polity and piety must 
have served them long ere the establishment of a common oracle 
had condensed the faiths of all into an identical mythology. Several 
circumstances, however, retarded the commercial prosperity of 
of ancient Greece and of modern Europe in the valorous knight of Ia Man- 
cha, whose Dulcinea del Toboso is not less a divinity than the Spartan 
Helen, at whose altar the Grecian heroes sacrificed a long ten years of hard- 
ship and adventure. Thucydides (Book 1, 9) rejects the fable and reserves 
the probability. 
26 The decision of Mr. Bryant, that such a war never existed, and the 
inferences arising out of the learned Excursus of Heyne, alluded to in note 6, 
class the whole history amongst the legends of poetic fiction. 
27 Every lover of classic lore (there are perhaps too many of them) will 
lament the fate of the gay and glorying Argo, which, fabricated by the im- 
mortal Gods, and freighted with the chivalry of Greece, waving her banners 
on the black waters of the Euxine, and ushering civilized to savage man, 
is foundered by the breath of remote and inevitable truth, and doomed to 
the fanciful regions of epic conception. 
28 History of America. The lover of romance may rest from the pursuit 
of fiction while he indulges in the his¢ory of marvels subdued to the tone of 
truth, and embellished by the hand of Robertson. 
2° Atan early period, however, the pretensions of the oracle at Delphi were 
sustained by the superstition or policy of the Amphyctionic council, and the 
temporal edicts of the Grecian magistrates confirmed the eternal decree of 
the God of Day, 
