“Travellers who have penetrated into the interior of Africa,” says he, “give an account of prodigious serpents, who advance among the bushes and towering reeds of some vast jungle, like a huge beam suddenly endowed with motion. Herds of gazelles and other timid animals take flight on their approach; nor can iron penetrate the skin of the monster, which is, indeed, appalling when extended to its utmost length, and ravenous after food. The only chance of its extermination is by setting fire to the nearest bushes of the jungle; and thus raising, as it were, a rampart of fire between you and the gigantic reptile.
“Such, probably, was the serpent which arrested the progress of the Roman army on the coast of Africa. To compute its length at one hundred and twenty feet, after Pliny, would probably be an exaggeration; but the Roman naturalist adds that its skin remained some time suspended, as a trophy, in a temple in Rome. Unless we deny all authenticity to history, therefore, we are bound to believe in the existence of a prodigious serpent, which when irritated by hunger, was known to attack the Roman soldiers; and against which, in the sequel, they had successful recourse to their engines of war.”
In the same manner, a distorted account may hereafter reach posterity of the death of Chuny, the famous elephant, which so long inhabited a menagerie in London; until becoming rabid from the effect of high feeding and long confinement, a party of military was called in to despatch the infuriated animal by a discharge of musketry, which was with some difficulty effected.
To attest the authenticity of the serpent of the time of Regulus, Pliny expressly adds that the tradition is the more credible, because, in former times, the serpents called boas, frequently found in Italy, were of such prodigious size that, during the reign of the Emperor Claudius, so large a one was found on the Vatican hill, that after its destruction, a child was exhibited entire in its stomach. For many centuries, no boas have been found in Italy; though naturalists accord in asserting them to have existed there in the olden time; just as the kingdom of England, now wholly free from the larger beasts of prey, was formerly overrun with wolves.
St. Isidore of Seville discredits the existence of the Lernian hydra; inferring from its name that hydra only implied some torrent or lake which Hercules effectually confined within banks; thus giving rise to the tradition of his having crushed it with his club. The traditionary monster, called a gargouille, said to have lived near Rouen, and to have swallowed a prodigious number of victims, is now admitted to have been simply a whirlpool in the Seine, destroyed by an alteration in the banks effected by St. Romain, when Bishop of that See. The anniversary of this event, regarded as the deliverance of the city from a monster, was celebrated at Rouen till the period of the first Revolution; a prisoner being annually delivered by the city on the Festival of St. Romain in honour of the miracle. The gargouille or whirlpool, of Rouen, was but a modern edition of the hydra.
CHAPTER VII.
THE JEWS.
We have already alluded incidentally to the Jews. But the children of Israel have been too long and too perseveringly an object of persecution to all Christian nations, not to demand a more extended consideration.