a golden colour; beards yellow 1 bushy; and eyebrows more eleted than the others, underneath ich are eyes of a stern and terrible pect.

In their tortuous windings der the earth, they make a noise ke that of brass: their crests are d, and from them flashes a flame ighter than that of a torch. These agons conquer the elephant, and their turn are conquered by the dians in the manner following: They spread a scarlet cloth before eir holes, embroidered with golden ́tters, which, being charmed, bring 1 a sleep that at last subdues those yes which would be otherwise inincible. Other spells, consisting of any words extracted from their ccult philosophy, are used, by hich the dragon is so fascinated, hat he puts his head out of his hole nd falls asleep over the letters. Whilst he remains in this situation, he Indians rush upon him with pole-axes, and after cutting off his head, strip it of all its precious stones. The stones found in the head of these mountain dragons are said to have a transparent lustre, to emit a variety of colours, and to possess that kind of virtue attributed to the ring of Gyges, [which could render the wearer invisible.] But it often happens that these dragons seize the Indian in spite of his pole-axe and his cunning, and carry him off to their dens, making the whole mountain tremble. We are told of their inhabiting the mountains near the Red Sea, from which are heard terrible hissings; and that they are sometimes known to go down to the sea, and swim to a great distance from shore.' (Book iii., chapters 6, 7, 8. - We quote from the translation made in 1809 by the -Rev. Mr. Berwick, who observes in a note, that he believes the dragons described by Philostratus to be the same as the basilisk or cockatrice, which has fiery eyes, a sharp head, and a crest like a cock's comb, and the very sound of whose voice puts all other serpents to flight, forcing them at the same time to relinquish their prey.)

The precious jewels' which the ugly and venomous' dragon of the mountains wears in his head,' are said by some writers to be an antidote to poison; but, according to

VOL. XLV. NO. CCLXVI.

Pliny, they must be extracted from the creature while he is alive, for 'his envy and malice is such, that the moment he perceives himself dying, he takes care to destroy their virtue.'

Even among the aborigines of America, who were long cut off from all communication with the

Old World, we may, as before remarked, discover the existence of this prodigious fable, which has furthermore taken root in the minds of the learned of all ages, and been curiously exhibited in the frequent use of the word 'Dragon' in Astronomy, Natural History, and other sciences. Thus, in Astronomy, we have the terms Dragon's Head and Dragon's Tail; and a constellation of the northern hemisphere is called Draco Dragon. Among meteorologists, the appellation Draco Volans is applied to a certain meteor appearing in the shape of a flying dragon. In

or

Ichthyology, a fish, known in England by the name of the weever,' is denominated Draco Marinus or the Sea Dragon. A particular kind of crystal is called in Latin, Dracontia lapis, or Draconitis: we have already mentioned it as being thought to exist in the heads of dragons. The Dragon-fly, that radiant and delicate haunter of our summer gardens, will immediately suggest itself to the minds of every one. In Botany, we have Dragon's Head, Dragon-wort, Snap-Dragon, and Dracontium; and a species of palms is called the Dragon-tree, from a fable, current amongst botanists, of the figure of a dragon being discoverable beneath the rind of its

fruit. This tree yields a gummy or resinous juice, much used in medicinal preparations, and known by the name of Dragon's-blood, from the redness of its colour. In Architecture, we have Dragon-beams; and, in military affairs, the word dragoon, as applied to a certain division of cavalry, is said by some to have been derived from dragon; 'because,' says Bailey, at first they were as destructive to the enemy as dragons.'

But this fiction has left its stamp on other things as well as on science. It has imbued the minds of men in all ages, and been reflected by them

P

on many of the objects which surround us.

Sometime we see a cloud that's dragonish.

The pictured dragon beneath the rind of the fruit above alluded to, is only another instance of the facility with which any idea, however fantastic, may be realized to the bodily sight by those whose minds are prepossessed by that idea. Stanislaus Lubienetski, a Polish author, has left us an account, in his Theatrum Cometicum, of a comet which appeared in the shape of a dragon, with its head covered with snakes; and we have already seen how a meteor is made to assume-in a great degree from the imagination of those who behold it- a similar form. The Italians, we are told, call the old, crooked, and decaying branches of a vine' dragoni, from some fancied resemblance in them to dragons; and in the same nation a superstition is current concerning a plant called Dragonvalo or Serpentaria, which,' says Florio, in his Dictionary before cited, groweth two foot high when snakes begin to appear in springtime, and vanisheth in the beginning of winter; and at its vanishing, all snakes hide themselves.' This mysterious sympathy, as it is supposed to be, between the plant and the animal, is very grand; but a little reflection shows us that it is but a octical interpretation of a simple ad natural fact. The plant spoken of is probably one of those which die down to the earth at the approach of winter, and shoot up again in the spring; and the same skyey influences' which cause the vegetable dragon to vanish,' as Florio finely expresses it, at one season and reappear at another, induce the snakes

which, as we all know, are hybernating animals-to look out for places of shelter during the cold weather, and issue forth when it has passed.

Before we conclude, it may be as well to glance at the probable origin of the fable under consideration.

Upon a careful scrutiny, it may be discovered that the dragon is a compound of the serpent and the crocodile; a circumstance which, more than any other, tends to confirm the supposition that the fable originated in the East, where such animals are common, and was

propagated thence over the Europe. If the reader wi any picture of a dragon wi may have in his possession, t perceive that the head, the les the scaly appearance of thi bear a great resemblance current representations of crocodile; while the long and wreathed tail, and the power the creature evidently possesse winding itself round any 2 animal and crushing it to dea as manifestly derived from a serpent. The word 'drag' defined by Bailey, a sort of c pent,' and by Johnson, 'a b of winged serpent, perhaps w ginary. In Virgil's poem of Gnat, as translated by Spe we have a description of a serp in which many of the characterise of the dragon-such as its ma'ri armour of scales, eyes that thes forth flames of fire, and bloods sprinkled jaws-are included; s in many old writers the wic dragon' and 'serpent' or 'sa appear to be synonymous, as reader may already have observed the story from North's Plur inserted in an earlier part of is article, and in the passage fra Florio, quoted a short way back Thus, also, in the early Eng romance, entitled, The History! the Renowned Prince Arthur, Ă ̈isg of Britain, Sir Launcelot is r quested by the people of a ceriss country to deliver them from serpent that is in a tomb; and is mediately after, the same creature is alluded to as a Dragon. (Se chap. i., part 3.) Pliny has left w an account of some Indian and Ethiopic dragons, in which, though largely mixed with fable, we may clearly perceive that the boa-ostrictor is the animal really alluded to. 'India,' says he, 'brings forth the biggest elephants, as also the biggest dragons, that are continually st variance with them, and evermore fighting; and of such greatness are they, (i.e., the dragons,) that they can easily clasp and wind round about the elephants, and withal tie them fast with a knot. Modern travellers affirm that, in their combats with tigers, the boa-constrictors of the Indian jungles disable their enemy precisely after this fashion. Diodorus Siculus, too, testifies to the

cumstance of frequent and terble scuffles' happening between ephants and serpents in the Indian serts, whenever they meet at a ring. What Pliny goes on to ate, however, is evidently a fable, aving no foundation at all in fact; ut it is a fable which could only be old of serpents. In Ethiopia there e as great dragons bred as in India: Mo wit, twenty cubits long. It is *eported, that upon their coasts they

rap themselves, four or five of them ogether, one within another, like to hurdle or lattice-work, and thus Lass the seas to find better pasturage In Arabia, cutting the waves, and bearing up their heads aloft, which serve them instead of sails.'-(Old folio translation, 1601.) Milton, in book 10 of Paradise Lost, describes the transformation of Satan into ¿'a monstrous serpent' (v. 514); and in a few lines farther down (v. 529), he alludes to him as a dragon:

Larger than whom the sun g Ingender'd in the Pythian vale on slime, Huge Python.

Another instance in Milton, to the same effect, occurs in Samson Agonistes (v. 1692), where, though the word 'dragon' is used, the ordinary serpent is evidently meant :

And, as an evening dragon, came,
Assailant on the perched roosts
And nests in order ranged
Of tame villatic fowl, &c.

It is a well-known fact that serpents
are frequently in the habit of de-
vouring domestic birds.

A recent commentator on the first chapter of Genesis conceives that the twenty-first verse ( And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth,' &c.) should be translated thus:- Then the Word and Power of God also created dragons, which could only suffer by being crushed,' &c. His remarks upon this new reading are so curious, that they must be transferred to the present place.-'Dragons, which could only suffer by being crushed, were created before any of the land animals. Geologists name this creature the plesiosaurus,' [a kind of sea-serpent of enormous dimensions;] and its remains are found in the shale or slaty clay which, at a remote period, was the mud of vast tracts over our

globe. Its most remarkable characteristic is the great length of its neck, which contains forty-one vertebræ, while in all other reptiles there are only from three to eight. It was capable of paddling through mud, and could repose at the bottom of a shallow bog, with its head high above the surface. At what period in the history of the earth these creatures ceased to exist, we have no record; but a passage in Goldsmith's Roman History is so forcibly descriptive of some monster of which we have no other account (being serpentine, and so scaly as only to suffer death after being crushed), that we may be permitted to consider it the dragon of Genesis, the leviathan of Job, and the plesiosaurus of the geologists. Goldsmith states that Regulus, while leading his forces along the banks of the river Bagrada, in Africa, had his men attacked, as they went for water, by a serpent of enormous size, which placed itself so as to guard the banks of the river. It was one hundred and twenty feet long, with scales impenetrable to any weapon. Some of the boldest troops at first went to oppose its fury; but they soon fell victims to their rashness, being either killed by its devouring jaws, or crushed to pieces by the windings of its tail. The poisonous vapour that issued from it was still more formidable; and the men were so much terrified at its appearance, that they asserted they would much more joyfully have faced the whole Carthaginian army. For some time it seemed uncertain which should remain masters of the river, as, from the hardness of its scales, no ordinary efforts could drive it away. At last, Regulus was obliged to make use of the machines employed in battering down the walls of cities. Notwithstanding this, the serpent for a long time withstood all his efforts, and destroyed numbers of his men; but at length a very large stone, which was flung from an engine, happened to break its spine, and destroyed its marrow. By these means, the soldiers surrounded and killed it. Regulus, not less pleased with his victory than if he had gained a battle, ordered its skin to be sent to Rome, where it continued to be seen till the time of Pliny.'

If the reader will compare the sentences in italics in the above passage, with Spenser's description of a dragon, previously referred to, he will perceive many points of resemblance; such as, the scales which were impenetrable to any weapon' -the devouring jaws'-the length and perpetual involutions of the creature's tail-and the poisonous vapour' which it had the power of casting forth. Who does not perceive in these details (themselves, in all probability, exaggerations of the truth) the germs, not only of Spenser's dragon, but of every other in the range of poetical fiction?

There can, however, be no doubt that the crocodile has had its share in the origin of the fable now under consideration. Scales impenetrable to any weapon' are not a characteristic of serpents generally speaking, though the particular serpent encountered by Regulus may have been thus protected: crocodiles, on the contrary, are invariably provided with a defensive armour of such closeness and hardness as to blunt many of the weapons employed against it. The head, also, has evidently suggested that of the dragon: the similarity, indeed, is so great, that for a long time a large fossilized crocodile's head was exhibited at Aix as a veritable relic of the dragon vanquished by St. Martha. Mr. Hurdis, and other commen

tators on the Bible, are of opinice that the dragon of Scripture is nothing more nor less than the croce dile; and have supported that ide with a very close chain of reasoning. Thus, Isaiah (chap. xiii., v. 22) says, speaking of the approaching desolstion of Babylon: And the wild beasts of the islands shall cry in their desolate houses, and dragons in their pleasant palaces.' It is worthy of notice,' says Mr. Hurdis, ! 'that the crocodile was always com sidered as an inhabitant of the w derness; and such he might well be deemed: consequently it will not appear wonderful that he should choose the ruins of old deserted towns and cities, which were near rivers and lakes, for his especial abode when out of the water. Of Babylon, therefore, it might properly be said that, when she became desolate, the crocodile should erg in her pleasant palaces; and (Jeremiah, chap. li., v. 37) that she should be a dwelling-place for crocodiles.' The dragon in the Apocrypha, worshipped by the people of Babylon, and which Daniel is reported to have killed by forcing it to swallow lumps of pitch, fat, and hair, seethed toge ther, whereby it burst in sunder,' was probably a crocodile. And Linnæus places the dragon of Scrip ture under the scientific head of Crocodilus Africanus."

WHETHER the democracy of Europe, as we are assured by the official Gazette of Paris, is struck down by the successful combination of despotic governments; whether the Pope is once more firmly reestablished in that unlimited power which enabled his predecessors in the good old times to give away, as Voltaire says, every kingdom-except the kingdom of Heaven, which they sold; whether a war of territorial aggrandizement is in contemplation to sweep over the ranges of the Jura, and, pouring once more the trumpets and lances of France into the track of the Simplon, to devastate the republics of the Alps; whether Sardinia and Belgium are to be obliterated from the map, and absorbed by the insatiate ambition of a neighbouring state; or whether Prince Louis Napoleon is training his eagles in the Court of the Tuileries to let them loose upon the coast of England, with somewhat more effect than he fluttered the tame eagle of the Colosseum up the heights of Boulogne-are matters upon which, whatever we or others may think of them now, a very little time cannot fail to enlighten the world. In the meanwhile, it is not to be concealed that a feeling of uneasiness, founded, not unreasonably, on the condition of our defences, and the present unsatisfactory attitude of the Cabinet, has taken possession of the public mind in this country. The main questions involved in the apprehensions arising out of the strange events that have happened on the Continent during the last two months, can no longer be evaded; nor is it well for our own ecurity or for the sake of the

e world, of which Engeet-anchor, that they ed with indifference ther out of too sanun the prestige of fear of atever it

we do not ent, in the his subject. at even the of the new

ruler of France has ever contemplated a design so wild and hazardous as the invasion of England. We have had undeniable proofs of that remarkable individual's capacity for any eccentricities of fraud or violence within the compass of a despotic abuse of power, and a supreme independence of oaths and laws; but that he should seriously meditate an expedition, the inevitable effect of which would be to shake all the existing relations of the European powers, and to place himself in a position of the most imminent peril, is something which appears to us almost incredible. In France, sustained by some three or four hundred thousand bayonets against the just indignation of a people whose rights and traditions he has trampled into dust, he is, for a term, comparatively safe, except from the dagger or the bullet of the assassin ; but out of France it is clearly another affair. The moment he steps beyond the frontier, without a legitimate casus belli, to seek in a war of naked and unprovoked aggression the means of giving employment to the hordes of desperate mercenaries he has called into existence, he becomes embroiled in difficulties from which no coup-d'état can extricate him, and which, instead of tending to the extension or consolidation of the power he has usurped, will be the sure signal for the outbreak of those plots and conspiracies which are destined, sooner or later, to rend it to the centre. He may have deluded himself into the belief that he is a second Napoleon; the debasement of the people through the late crisis of terror, when he came upon them like a thief in the night, has probably inflated his vanity to the full dimensions of that gigantic conception; he may be looking forward with immeasurable confidence to a round of laurelled slumbers in the state beds of Berlin and Vienna, the German States, Italy, and the Low Countries; a future Jena, a more dazzling Austerlitz, may pass in visions of glory before his disturbed fancy; but amongst his confederates and advisers there must be some