Through strong oppression of his powre extort;

By which he still them holds, and keeps with strong effort.
And dayly he his wrongs encreaseth more,

For never wight he lets to pass that waye
Over his bridge, albee he rich or poore,
But he him makes his passage-penny paye;
Else he doth hold him backe or beate awaye.
Thereto he hath a groom of evil guise,
Whose scalp is bare, that bondage doth bewraye,
Which pols and pils the poore in piteous wise,
But he himself upon the rich doth tyrannise.'

"Here," says the Bishop, "we have the great oppressive baron very graphically set forth. And the groom of evil guise is as plainly the baron's vassal. The romancers, we see, took no great liberty with these respectable personages, when they called the one a giant, and the other a savage."

That men of gigantic stature have existed here and there, we have had testimony in our own days. Some of them, probably not the tallest, have been strong. The others are weak and ill-formed, like children that have outgrown their strength. Whether giants ever existed as a body is still a question. The Patagonians of Commodore Byron have come down to a reasonable stature; and the bones that used to be exhibited as proofs undeniable of enormous men, turn out to be those of the mammoth and the elephant. But this is the prose of gigantology. In poetry they are still alive and stalking.

The earliest giants were monstrous as well as huge. Those that warred with the gods, and heaped Ossa upon Pelion, had a multitude of heads and arms, with serpents instead of legs. Typhon, the evil principle, the dreadful wind (still known in the East under the same name, the

Todd's "Spenser," vol. vi. p. 7.

Tifoon), had dragons, instead of human heads, and out of each of them threw the shriek of a different animal. Enceladus was thrust under Mount Etna, from which he still vomits fire and smoke, and when he turns his side there is an earthquake. Otus and Ephialtes grew nine inches a month, and at nine years old made their campaign against the gods. Now and then a giant undertook to be more courtly and pious. When Juno, Neptune, and Minerva conspired to dethrone Jupiter, Briareus went up into heaven, and seating himself on his right hand, looked so very shocking that the deities were fain to desist.

There is a confusion of the giants with the Titans, but their wars were different. Those of the Titans were against Cœlus and Saturn; the giants warred against Jupiter. They were also of a different nature, the Titans being of proper celestial origin, whereas the birth of the giants was as monstrous as their shapes. As to the great stature of the Titans, all the gods were gigantic. It was only in their visits to earth that they accommodated themselves to human size, and then not in their wars. One of the noblest uses ever made of this association of bodily size with divine power is in "Paradise Lost," where Milton, in one of those passages in which his theology is as weak and perplexed as his verse is powerful, makes Abdiel say to the leader of the infernal armies,

single hand." Oh no! it is much finer than that. It means his hand, visibly alone, with nothing round about it, solitary in the great space of existence. It stretches out into the ether, dashing, at one blow, a great host into nothing; then draws back into heaven, and there is a silence as if existence itself were annihilated.

The Cyclops is a variety of the giant monstrous. He has one eye, and is a man-eater. Mr. Bryant, who, in his "Elements of Ancient Mythology,” amidst a heap of wild and gratuitous assumptions, has some ingenious conjectures, is of opinion that a Cyclops was a watch-tower, with a round window in it showing a light, and that by the natural progress of fable the tower became a man. If the light however was for good purposes, the charge of maneating is against the opinion. The Cyclopes, a real people, who left the old massy specimens of architecture, called after their name, are said to have been in the habit of carrying shields with an eye painted on them, or wore visors with a hole to see through. But these conjectures are not necessary to our treatise. The proper, huge, cannibal giant, the Fee-faw-fum of antiquity, is our monster. Homer, who wandered about the world, and took marvels as they came, has painted him in all his cruelty. Theocritus, writing pastorals at the court of Ptolemy, and more of a "sweet Signior," found out a refinement for him, which, to say the truth, is superior to jesting, and has touched a chord which the inventor of the character of Hector would have admired. He made Polyphemus in love; and we are sorry for the monster, and wish Galatea to treat him with as much tenderness as is compatible with her terrors.* His discovery of his forlorn condition,

*Those who wish to know how music can express a giant's misery con

his fear that his senses are forsaking him, and his eagerness to suppose that he is not altogether alien to humanity, because the village girls, when he speaks to them from his mountain at night-time, laughed at him, render him no longer a monstrosity odious, but a difference pitiable.*

There is a Polyphemus in the story of "Sindbad" so like Homer's, that the ingenious author of the "Remarks on the Arabian Nights' Entertainments " pronounces it to be copied from him. Homer, however, might have copied it from the Orientals. He might have heard it from Eastern traders, granting it was unknown to the Greeks before. The wanderings of Ulysses imply a compilation of wonders from all parts of the world. The Greeks, except in this instance, appear to have had no idea of a nation of giants. Even Polyphemus they mixed up with their mythology, making him a son of Neptune. On the other hand, the grandiosity of the Orientals supplied them with giants in abundance, and Sir John Mandeville had no need, as Mr. Hole imagines, to go to Virgil and Ovid for his descrip.. tions of huge monsters, eating men as they go, "all raw and all quicke."

Ariosto, in the seventeenth book of his great poem, has a Polyphemus with two projecting bones, instead of eyes, of the color of fungus. This is very ghastly. He calls

trasted with the happiness of two innocent lovers, should hear the serenata of "Acis and Galatea," by Handel, the giant of the orchestra.

("Where giant Handel stands,

Arm'd, like Briareus, with his hundred hands."— Pope.)

The terrible intonations of Polyphemus in his despair, with those lovely unweeting strains of the happy pair immediately issuing out upon them, "Ere I forsake my love," &c., offer perhaps the finest direct piece of contrast in the whole circle of music.

*Theocritus, "Idyll." xi. v. 72.

him an orco, that is to say, an ogre. Ogre, whether derived from the Latin orcus, or from Oigour (a tribe of Tartars), or Hongrois, or Hungarian,* is a man-eater; and orco appears to be the same, though not confined to the man-monster. The same poet, in his rifacimento of the story of Andromeda (canto 10), calls the fish an orc; and the word is used in a like sense in our elder poetry. Ariosto's Polyphemus (for he gives him a cavern, sheep, &c., exactly like those of the old Cyclops) has no sight at all with those horrible goggles of his. An exquisite sense of smelling supplies the want of it;

and he comes running upon his prey, dipping his nose towards the ground.

"Mentre aspettiamo, in gran piacer sedendo,
Che da caccia ritorni il signor nostro,
Vedemmo l'orco a noi venir correndo
Lungo il lito del mar, terribil mostro.
Dio vi guardi, signor, che 'l viso orrendo
De l'orco a gli occhi mai vi sia dimostro.
Meglio e per fama aver notiza d'esso,
Ch' andargli, si che lo veggiate, appresso.

"Non si puo compartir quanto sia lungo,
Si smisuratamente è tutto grosso.
In luogo d' occhi, di color di fungo
Sotto la fronte ha due coccole d'osso.
Verso noi vien, come vi dico, lungo
Il lito e par ch'un monticel sia mosso.
Mostra le zanne fuor, come fa il porco:
Ha lungo il naso, e'l sen bavoso e sporco.

"Correndo viene, e'l muso a guisa porta

Che'l braccio suol, quando entra in su la traccia.

Tutti che lo veggiam, con faccia smorta

In fugo andiamo ove il timor ne caccia.

*See "Fairy Mythology," vol. ii.