Hercules.—­Wits as well as heroes can take up the distaff.  What think you of their thin-spun systems of philosophy, or lascivious poems, or Milesian fables?  Nay, what is still worse, are there not panegyrics on tyrants, and books that blaspheme the gods and perplex the natural sense of right and wrong?  I believe if Eurystheus was to set me to work again he would find me a worse task than any he imposed; he would make me read through a great library; and I would serve it as I did the hydra, I would burn as I went on, that one chimera might not rise from another to plague mankind.  I should have valued myself more on clearing the library than on cleansing the Augean stables.

Cadmus.—­It is in those libraries only that the memory of your labours exists.  The heroes of Marathon, the patriots of Thermopylae, owe their immortality to me.  All the wise institutions of lawgivers and all the doctrines of sages had perished in the ear, like a dream related, if letters had not preserved them.  Oh Hercules! it is not for the man who preferred virtue to pleasure to be an enemy to the muses.  Let Sardanapalus and the silken sons of luxury, who have wasted life in inglorious ease, despise the records of action which bear no honourable testimony to their lives.  But true merit, heroic virtue, each genuine offspring of immortal Jove, should honour the sacred source of lasting fame.

Hercules.—­Indeed, if writers employed themselves only in recording the acts of great men, much might be said in their favour.  But why do they trouble people with their meditations?  Can it signify to the world what an idle man has been thinking?

Cadmus.—­Yes, it may.  The most important and extensive advantages mankind enjoy are greatly owing to men who have never quitted their closets.  To them mankind is obliged for the facility and security of navigation.  The invention of the compass has opened to them new worlds.  The knowledge of the mechanical powers has enabled them to construct such wonderful machines as perform what the united labour of millions by the severest drudgery could not accomplish.  Agriculture, too, the most useful of arts, has received its share of improvement from the same source.  Poetry likewise is of excellent use to enable the memory to retain with more ease, and to imprint with more energy upon the heart, precepts of virtue and virtuous actions.  Since we left the world, from the little root of a few letters, science has spread its branches over all nature, and raised its head to the heavens.  Some philosophers have entered so far into the counsels of divine wisdom as to explain much of the great operations of nature.  The dimensions and distances of the planets, the causes of their revolutions, the path of comets, and the ebbing and flowing of tides are understood and explained.  Can anything raise the glory of the human species more than to see a little creature, inhabiting a small spot, amidst innumerable