PREFACE. This new edition of the Mythology of Greece and Italy is properly speaking a new work. Few pages or even paragraphs remain unaltered, and nearly two-thirds of it are new matter, or have been rewritten. The causes of this change (of which I think an explanation is due) are as follows. The work was originally intended to be a mere school-book, and it was commenced on that plan ; circumstances caused it to be continued on another, and to be completed on a third ; hence the inequality in it which every one must have observed.

“Here a vast hill ‘gainst thund’ring Baal was thrown, Trees and beasts fell on ‘t, burnt with lightning down; One flings a mountain and its river too, Torn up with ‘t; that rains back on him that threw; Some from the main to pluck whole islands try; The sea boils round with flames shot thick from sky.” […] “—— The god who mounts the winged winds, Fast to his feet the golden pinions binds, That high through fields of air his flight sustain, O’er the wide earth, and o’er the boundless main: He grasps the wand that causes sleep to fly, Or in soft slumbers seals the wakeful eye; Then shoots from heav’n to high Pieria’s steep, And stoops incumbent on the rolling deep.”