The humorous ballad in the Percy Reliques (vol. iv. p. 198), written it is supposed close upon Shakespeare’s times, declares,—
“Old stories tell, how Hercules
A dragon slew at Lerna,
With seven heads and fourteen eyes
To see and well discern-a:
But he had a club, this dragon to drub,
Or he had ne’er done it. I warrant ye.”
It is curious that the device in Corrozet’s Hecatomgraphie of the Dragon of Lerna should figure forth, in the multiplication of processes or forms, what Hamlet terms “the law’s delay.”
