magnificent courts and enclosures, and erected a grand entrance to it,
such as no other story, fable, or Poem ever had. But, as he began it
late, he ended his life before the work, so that the more the reader is
delighted with the part that is written, the more regret he has to find
it unfinished."

There can be no question that Solon visited Egypt. The causes of his
departure from Athens, for a period of ten years, are fully explained by
Plutarch. He dwelt, he tells us,

"On the Canopian shore, by Nile's deep mouth."

There be conversed upon points of philosophy and history with the most
learned of the Egyptian priests. He was a man of extraordinary force and
penetration of mind, as his laws and his sayings, which have been
preserved to us, testify. There is no improbability in the statement
that he commenced in verse a history and description of Atlantis, which
he left unfinished at his death; and it requires no great stretch of the
imagination to believe that this manuscript reached the hands of his
successor and descendant, Plato; a scholar, thinker, and historian like
himself, and, like himself, one of the profoundest minds of the ancient
world. The Egyptian priest had said to Solon, "You have no antiquity of
history, and no history of antiquity;" and Solon doubtless realized
fully the vast importance of a record which carried human history back,
not only thousands of years before the era of Greek civilization, but
many thousands of years before even the establishment of the kingdom of
Egypt; and he was anxious to preserve for his half-civilized countrymen
this inestimable record of the past.

We know of no better way to commence a book about Atlantis than by