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"When your Æneas fought, but fought with odds
Of force unequal, and unequal gods:
I spread a cloud before the victor's sight,
Sustain'd the vanquish'd, and secured his flight--
Even then secured him, when I sought with joy
The vow'd destruction of ungrateful Troy."
Dryden's Virgil, v. 1058.
2
68 --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.
2
69 "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
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