As hee a lyon did pursue,

Which I myself did alsoe slay.

When he came home he did greater actions; for, in addition to killing the dun cow, he demolished a monstrous bore-what a god-send a Sir Guy would be at the clubs!—and sent him to Coventry :

But first, near Winsor, I did slaye

Then again:

A bore of passing might and strength;
Whose like in England never was

For hugeness both in bredth and length.

Some of his bones in Warwicke yet,
Within the castle there doe lye:
One of his shield-bones to this day,
Hangs in the city of Coventrye.

A dragon in Northumberland,

I also did in fight destroye,

Which did both man and beaste oppress

And all the countrye sore annoye.

This dragon is thus portrayed in the old metrical romance;
A messenger came to the king,
Syr king, he said, lysten me now,
For bad tydinges I bring you,

In Northumberlande there is no man,

But that they be slayne every chone:

For there dare no man route,

By twenty mile rounde aboute,
For doubt of a fowle dragon

That sleathe men and beastes downe.
He is black as any cole

Rugged as a rough fole:

His body from the navill upwarde
No man may it pierce it is so harde;
His neck is great as any summere ;"
He runneth as swift as any distrere ;t
Pawes he hath as a lyon:

All that he toucheth, he sleath dead downe,

Great winges he hath to flight,

There is no man that bare him' might.

There may no man fight him agayne,
But that he sleath him certayne:
For a fowler beast then is he,
Ywis of none ever heard ye.

In the ballad of "Guy and Amarant," Sir Guy alludes to his former victories when he says to the thirsty giant,

* A sumpter horse.

†The horse ridden by a knight in the tournament.

Goe drinke thy last,

Go pledge the dragon and the savage bore;
Succeed the tragedyes that they have past.
But never think to drinke cold water more;
Drink deepe to Death, and unto him carouse;
Bid him receive thee in his earthen house.

Nor was this any vain boast: for Guy dealt this pagan
A blowe that brought him with a vengeance downe.

Then Guy sett foot upon the monster's brest,

And from his shoulders did his head divide,
Which with a yawninge mouth did gape unblest,
Noe dragon's jawes were ever seene so wide
Το open and to shut, till life was spent,

Then Guy tooke keyes and to the castle went.

The giant's miserable captives are then delivered, and among them some "tender ladyes," who

had noe other dyett every day,

Than flesh of human creatures for their food.

It was hard that one who thus went about doing good, should have met with so ill a reward: all these brilliant actions could not save poor Sir Guy from being crossed in love, nor from the tragic end which the reader will find, if so disposed, recorded in his "Legend."

St. George's dragon was eminently pestiferous :

Against the Sarazens so rude,

Fought he full long and many a day;
Where many gyants he subdu'd,

In honour of the Christian way;
And after many adventures past,
To Egypt land he came at last.

Now, as the story plain doth tell,

Within that country there did rest.
A dreadfull dragon fierce and fell,

Whereby they were full sore opprest:
Who by his poisonous breath each day,
Did many of the city slay.

The dragon's breath infects their blood,
That every day in heaps they dye';
Among them such a plague is bred,
The living scarce could bury the dead.

The rest of this legend is so well known, that it would be needlessly occupying space to dwell further upon the subject of it. We would only observe that the dragon's poisonous breath did the principal mischief.

But the time was at hand when the coup de grace was to be given to these dragon tragedies by the comic verse, showing how More of More Hall, with nothing at all,

He slew the dragon of Wantley.

This clever performance was, as has been well observed, to the old metrical romaunts and ballads of chivalry what Don Quixote was to prose narratives of the same kind; and whether the witty author made his dragon out of a bloated Yorkshire attorney who had stripped three orphans of their inheritance, and had become intolerable by his encroachments and rapacity till a neighbouring gentleman took up the cause of the oppressed, went to law with him, and broke his hard heart; or some other passages in local history are therein alluded to, no dragon could be brought before the public thereafter without ridicule.

Thus much for the fabulous part of our subject, as far as it regards terrestrial dragons. We constantly find allusions to the malaria that surrounded these monsters and their localities. It is not unworthy of remark, that the crass air which the real extinct dragons breathed, would, as has been satisfactorily established, have been fatal to man if he had then been upon the earth which now holds their remains. That earth is one vast grave of cities, of nations, of creations.

SEA DRAGONS.

"And there in many a stormy vale
The scald hath told his wondrous tale,
And many a Runic column high
Had witnessed grim idolatry.
And thus had Harold in his youth
Learned many a Saga's rhyme uncouth-
Of that sea-snake, tremendous curled,
Whose monstrous circle girds the world."

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LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL.

THE Hebrew words "Than," Thanin," and "Thanim," which occur so frequently in the sacred Scriptures, seem to have puzzled the learned, for they sometimes appear as "whales," sometimes as "serpents," "sea-monsters" and "dragons" in their English dress. That some of the "Thanin" were crocodiles, particularly the living idol which the Babylonians worshipped

according to "the Historie of Bel and the Dragon, which is the fourteenth chapter of Daniel after the Latine," as the apocryphal book is headed in "the Bible translated according to the Hebrew and Greeke, and conferred with the best Translations in divers languages Imprinted at London by ROBERT BARKER, printer to the King's most excellent Maiestie. 1615. Cum Privilegio" -seems generally agreed; and in Egypt the crocodile was one of the symbols of Typhon.

Your crocodile comes of a very ancient house; for, to say nothing of the evidence above hinted at, we think we have proof to show that the great Gangetic crocodile (not the Gavial) now fast retiring before the inroads of steam, was in existence with some of the extinct Saurians or Old-World dragons. What is all the blood of all the Howards to such ancestry?

The Edda, overflowing as it is with fiction, comprises no wilder tale than that of the "Jormungandr," the ocean-snake or dragon alluded to by the Wizard of the North in our motto. Thor, no bad hand at battering serpents, as Fuseli has shown in one of his. most characteristic works, was, it appears, wont to solace himself in his hours of relaxation with the contemplative man's recreation, and, accordingly, he went a fishing for this monster. Having set forth his rod in his best style, he baited his hook with a bull's head, and like many other anglers who relate their adventures in trying for a trout of extraordinary dimensions, very nearly caught it the said trout being a twelve or fifteen pounder, and although his eyes have been greeted with the devices of half the fishingtackle shops in London, still coolly enjoying his ancient haunt in the deep glassy eddy that curls by the side of one of the great Thames weirs, where half the mighty river comes thundering down. The snake, however, was not to be had, and is still reserved for the exploits which he is to perform in the battle royal between demons and divinities that is to precede the "Ragnarockr" or twilight of the gods.

It must have been a very tiny infant Jormungandr that Olaus Magnus has depicted in the shape of a sea-serpent, not above two or three hundred feet long, quietly intruding its head between the main and mizen masts of some "great ammiral," and cracking the crew like sugared almonds. To the same family must have. belonged the "Reversus" of the Indian sea, by means of which the Cuba fishermen were said to fill their canoes with turtle, et cætera. This serpent-like looking anguilliform entity is figured with a kind of purse proceeding from his crown, and falling in a descending curve over his very sharp pike of a nose upon the head of a devoted seal, which, thus "bonnetted," and staring with terror and astonishment, is held fast by the Reversus, as the Retiarius of old held his antagonist; whilst a piteous-looking turtle

is biding his turn to be taken in like manner. Not that it is improbable that the highly coloured description of some ancient mariner of the alleged method of fishing with the adhesive Remora, by putting it overboard tied to a long string, till it fastens on some sleeping Testudinarian, which is thus drawn to the boat and secured, may not have run away with the artist's imagination, and produced the grand cut which graces the page of Aldrovaudi.

But these legends were of yesterday; nor must we be tempted by Pontoppidan or Egede, nor by any modern sea-serpent or dragon, whether Scandinavian, Caledonian, or American, to forget our petrified old friends, who lead us back to a period long before the fair face of this blest Isle of beauty

"Arose from out the azure main;"

when the Trilobite adhered where the snail now creeps; and when the extinct sea-dragons rushed through living groves of Encrinites and Pentacrinites, devouring fishes now only known in a fossil state, each other, and occasionally perhaps a Pterodactyle, in a universal round game of snap-dragon.

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To arrest the credat, which most probably and pardonably will rise to the lips of those to whom such a scene is now first laid open, we must call in the aid of the Dean of Westminster. "During these ages of reptiles," says the eloquent author of the "Bridgewater Treatise,' neither the carnivorous nor the lacustrine mammalia of the tertiary periods had begun to appear; but the most formidable occupants, both by land and water, were crocodiles and lizards, of various forms and often of gigantic stature, fitted to endure the turbulence and continual convulsions of the unquiet surface of our infant world."

"When we see," continues the Doctor, "that so large and important a range has been assigned to reptiles among the former population of our planet, we cannot but regard with feelings of new and unusual interest, the comparatively diminutive existing orders of the most ancient family of quadrupeds, with the very name of which we usually associate a sentiment of disgust. We shall view them with less contempt when we learn, from the records of geological history, that there was a time when reptiles not only constituted the chief tenants and most powerful possessors of the earth, but extended their dominion also over the waters of the seas, and that the annals of their history may be traced back through thousands of years antecedent to that latest point in. the progressive stages of animal creation when the first parents of the human race were called into existence."

This it must be granted is startling; but it is not more startling than true hear Dr. Buckland again ;—