joy The vow'd destruction of ungrateful Troy." Dryden's Virgil, v. 1058. 268 --_On Polydore._ Euripides, Virgil, and others, relate that Polydore was sent into Thrace, to the house of Polymestor, for protection, being the youngest of Priam's sons, and that he was treacherously murdered by his host for the sake of the treasure sent with him. 269 "Perhaps the boldest excursion of Homer into this region of poetical fancy is the collision into which, in the twenty-first of the Iliad, he has brought the river god Scamander, first with Achilles, and afterwards with Vulcan, when summoned by Juno to the hero's aid. The overwhelming fury of the stream finds the natural interpretation in the character of the mountain torrents of Greece and Asia Minor. Their wide, shingly beds are in summer comparatively dry, so as to be easily forded by the foot passenger. But a thunder-shower in the mountains, unobserved perhaps by the traveller on the plain, may suddenly immerse him in the flood of a mighty river. The rescue of Achilles by the fiery arms of Vulcan scarcely admits of the same ready explanation from physical causes. Yet the subsiding of the flood at the critical moment when the hero's destruction appeared imminent, might, by a slight extension of the figurative parallel, be ascribed to a god symbolic of the influences opposed to all atmospheric moisture."--Mure, vol. i. p. 480, sq. 270 Wood has observed, that "the circumstance of a falling tree, which is described as reaching from one of its banks to the other, affords a very just idea of the breadth of the Scamander." 271 --_Ignominious._ Drowning, as compared with a death in the field of battle, was considered utterly disgraceful. 272 --_Beneath a caldron._ "So, when with crackling flames a caldron fries, The b