ures, to correct
power, protect weakness, and to unite individuals in a common interest
and general welfare. Heroes may kill tyrants, but it is wisdom and laws
that prevent tyranny and oppression. The operations of policy far
surpass the labours of Hercules, preventing many evils which valour and
might cannot even redress. You heroes consider nothing but glory, and
hardly regard whether the conquests which raise your fame are really
beneficial to your country. Unhappy are the people who are governed by
valour not directed by prudence, and not mitigated by the gentle arts!

_Hercules_.--I do not expect to find an admirer of my strenuous life in
the man who taught his countrymen to sit still and read, and to lose the
hours of youth and action in idle speculation and the sport of words.

_Cadmus_.--An ambition to have a place in the registers of fame is the
Eurystheus which imposes heroic labours on mankind. The muses incite to
action as well as entertain the hours of repose; and I think you should
honour them for presenting to heroes such a noble recreation as may
prevent their taking up the distaff when they lay down the club.

_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