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Then, instead of piteous, ghastly Death walking in his furrow, whip in hand, the painter of allegories could place beside the ploughman a radiant angel, sowing the blessed grain in the smoking furrows with generous hand. And the dream of a peaceful, free, poetical, laborious, simple existence for the husbandman is not so difficult of conception that it need be relegated to a place among chimeras.

"I do not love reasoning in allegories," cries Booth; "but with regard to love, I declare I never found anything cloying in it. I have lived almost alone with my wife near three years together, was never tired with her company, nor ever wished for any other; and I am sure I never tasted any of the acid you mention to quicken my appetite."

Thus, while Jupiter, to the vulgar mind, was the god or the upper regions, "who dwelt on the Summits of the highest mountains, gathered the clouds about him, shook the air with his thunder, and wielded the lightning as the instrument of his wrath," yet in all this he was but the symbol of the ether or atmosphere which surrounds the earth; and hence, the numerous fables of this monarch of the gods may be considered merely as "allegories which typify the great generative power of the universe, displaying itself in a variety of ways, and under the greatest diversity of forms."

This, according to the laws of interpreting allegories, we should understand to signify that the god had been renowned for his wisdom; that with the wisdom of the serpent he had executed judgment; and that his meditations were the profundity of wisdom.

Some state that the author, a friend of Clement Marot, intended to preach by the use of allegories the Reformed religion. Others say that it was directed against the manners and conduct of some members of the Court. Whether Morin's request was granted I know not, nor whether Desperiers shared his imprisonment. At any rate, the author died in 1544 from an attack of frenzy.

Accordingly while the study of metaphysics and the explanation of the allegories of Scripture are thus shown to be a necessity of intelligent belief, it is not proper to begin with these difficult subjects. One must first be mature intellectually and possessed of the preliminary sciences.

"I do not love reasoning in allegories," cries Booth; "but with regard to love, I declare I never found anything cloying in it. I have lived almost alone with my wife near three years together, was never tired with her company, nor ever wished for any other; and I am sure I never tasted any of the acid you mention to quicken my appetite."

When, in a later age, Karmath, the impostor of the East, sough to undermine Mahometanism, his most successful policy was in declaring its commands to be allegories. And although this cannot be believed literally, in some respects it may metaphorically. Doubtless the poets took their descriptions from popular traditions; but they made those traditions immortal.

Among those who sometimes came to listen to little Lib's allegories was Mary Ann Sherman, a tall, dark, gloomy woman of whom I had heard much. She was the daughter of old Deacon Sherman, a native of the village, who had, some years before I came to Greenhills, died by his own hand, after suffering many years from a sort of religious melancholia.

They are analogous to those symbolic devotional pictures in which the Madonna and saints of all ages are grouped together with the painter's own contemporaries no allegories at all, but the plain embodiment of a fact in which the artist believed; not only "the communion of all saints," but also their habit of assisting, often in visible form, the Christians of his own time.