Here then we have a description comparative of the poetic chants and the twelve works, and of the heavenly appearances during the twelve months of the Sun's, or rather the Earth's annual revolutions; the Sun, as our readers already know, having only a local motion on its own axis. Who will now deny that the indefatigable Hercules was a personification of the Sun? Let every reader judge of the relations, and see to what extent the poem and the calendar agree. It is sufficient for us to say that we have not inverted the series of the twelve works, but have given it precisely as related by Diodorus of Sicily; and as to the celestial phenomena, all can verify them with a sphere, by causing the colure of the solstices to pass by the lion and aquarius, and that of the equinoxes by the bull and the scorpion, which was the position of the sphere at the epoch when the lion opened the solstitial year about four hundred years before our era.

Even if the ancient philosophers had not informed us that Hercules was the Sun, even though the universality of his worship did not prove that a Greek prince could not possibly have produced such astonishing results in the religious world, and that so high a destiny belonged to no mortal, but only to the great god Sun, the benefactor and preserver of our existence, it would suffice to seize all the relations of the double tableau, in order to conclude with moral certainty that the hero of the poems is the god that measures time; who conducts the year, regulates the seasons and the months, and distributes heat and life to all nature. To read the history of Hercules as a bona-fide hero, is to read a monstrous tissue of absurdities a heap of fable, which accords with no chronology, offering in every page the most absurd contradictions, when men ignorantly insist that what was ascribed to Hercules was really performed by a man; but it is a poem, vast, comprehensive, and ingenious, when understood to treat of the god which fructifies the universe. There all is movement, all is change, all is life. The sol❤ stitial Sun represented with all the attributes of force and power that he has acquired at that epoch, and that seems contained in him the depository of the universal force of the world. He is invested with the skin of a lion, and armed with an enormous club. He throws himself majestically and fiercely into the career that he is obliged to run through by the eternal order of nature. It is not the sign of the lion that he runs through-it is a frightful lion that

ravages the country; he goes to offer it combat; he attacks and stifles it in his arms, decks himself in the spoils of the vanquished animal, then passes on to achieve another victory. The celestial Hydra is the second monster which presents an obstacle to his course. Poets represent this monster as a serpent with a hundred heads, which it is vain to cut off, as they renew themselves, and with terrible additions; but Hercules burns them with his destructive fires. The ravages which that frightful animal made, the fright of the inhabitants who resided near the cavern which served as a retreat for the monster; the horrible hissings of the hundred heads, and on the other side the undaunted air of the vanquisher of the Nemean lion; then his embarrassment when he saw the heads that he had cut off renewed by the power of the monster; all is painted or described in the same manner that Virgil describes the victory of the same hero upon the monster Cacus.

It is besides, a consequence fairly to be drawn from the comparison we have instituted, that Hercules was not a mortal elevated to the rank of a god for his courage and the benefit he had conferred upon mankind; nor the events of his pretended life, historical facts; but merely astronomical phenomena, and further proves that the testimony of many ages and many people, in favour of the existence as men of the heroes of the different religions, the memory of whom is consecrated by a worship, by poems, and by legends, called sacred, is not by any means a sure or certain pledge of their historic reality: the example of Hercules shews that consequence in all its force. The Greeks believed in the existence as a man of Hercules quite as sincerely as the Christians believe in the existence as man of Christ; but as before hinted, the belief of a people proves nothing more than the belief; which must always give way before the evidence furnished by experience. What excellent matter for reflection to those who repose confidently upon the grand, but most fallacious, argument, that the belief of one or many people, and of many ages, can establish the truth of a matter of dispute; above all, in that which touches religion, where the first duty is to believe without examination: surely, in such a case, the philosophy of one man is worth more than the mere opinion of thousands of men born and nursed in ages of credulity. These reflections find their application in the solar fable made upon Christ, the chief of the twelve apostles the hero of the Christian legend! nor will

eighteen centuries of fraud and imposture destroy the striking relations between that fable and the other sacred romances made upon the Sun, that Plato called the only Son of God; but the Christians will speedily be compelled to acknowledge, at least those among them who dare to examine our Letters, that they are worshippers of the Sun, as the Indians, Americans, Phenecians, Ethiopians, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, and in short, all people, ancient and modern; only they worship the Sun under the name of Christ instead of Atys, Adonis, Jupiter, Apollo, Hercules, Bacchus, or Chrishna. Yes, the star which regenerates nature every year, at the moment of the celebration of Easter, is the great God of all the nations, and much lauded Christianity is mere idolatory. This has been proved in our two last Letters, when treating on the origin of the festivals of Christmas and of Easter, and their connection with the supposed birth, death, and resurrection of Christ.

It is easy to understand what kind of developement a true poet was able to give to singular ideas, which were derived from physics in general-and astronomy in particular--whether agriculture or geography, or even politics or morals; for all particular ends entered into the general system of the first philosophic poets, who sung of the gods, and introduced man into the sanctuary of nature, which seemed to have revealed to them all its mysteries. What a delightful field for the display of genius, when fiction and allegory had full liberty-all to feign and all to dare! for nothing can be impossible to the gods-of course, we allude to the gods of human imagining, to whom it belonged to astonish all mankind, by a display of their magnificence and power! What a wonderful career for genius to describe and paint, with all the force human language would permit, the wonders of the universe! That was indeed the age of gold for poetry, which has been called the child of the sky and the gods. Since those ancient times, all poetic compositions are comparatively tame and spiritless-having little of that sublimity and that boldness of speculation sustained by all the force of genius when excited and sustained by the phenomena of nature, or that great God, of whom the poets were, in former times, the only priests and interpreters. There is very little poetry about modern priests, who are, in general, prosy, dull, and stupid enough; but with the ancient teachers of the nations, all was enthusiasm and sublimity; and nothing can open a vaster field to our conjectures