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These stories, of the greatest weakness and levity, are related and believed with the most implicit folly. But, rejecting these fables with contempt, a Deity is diffused in every part of nature; in earth under the name of Ceres, in the sea under the name of Neptune, in other parts under other names.
This gave D. a new opportunity, and he produced, in addition to translations from Juvenal and Perseus, his famous "Virgil" . About the same time appeared The Ode for St. Cecilia's Day, and Alexander's Feast, and in 1700, the year of his death, the Fables, largely adaptations from Chaucer and Boccaccio.
In the second, he endeavors to accommodate the fables of Orpheus, Musæus, Hesiod, and Homer to what he has advanced in the first, in order that the most ancient poets, who never dreamed of these things, may seem to have been Stoics.
We reconstructed on the spot the tradition of St. Remigius and his adventures with the fairy Mazelane. The Champagne country is rich in tales. Nearly all the old Gaulish fables had their origin in this province. Rheims is the land of chimeras. It is perhaps for this reason that kings were crowned there.
They were unresting in their exertions took the whole affair under their personal supervision, and invented a hundred fables to sting and arouse me. You would have said that they were bloody minded the busy-bodies and bent on trouble; that their aim was to profoundly enrage me, and cause bloodshed.
Certainly, the country has much to lose in his death, but I hope that God will not so much afflict us." Yet the calumniators of the day did not scruple to circulate, nor the royalist chroniclers to perpetuate, the most senseless and infamous fables on the subject of this nobleman's death.
Notwithstanding this alone had produced them, it was still imagined, that the menaces of heaven would restrain passions which every thing conspired to rouse in all hearts; fatuity persuaded monarchs that ideal, metaphysical barriers, terrible fables, distant phantoms, would be competent to curb those inordinate desires, to rein in that impetuous propensity to crime, that rendered society incommodious to itself; credulity fancied that invisible powers would be more efficacious, than those visible motives that evidently invited mortals to the commission of mischief.
"They wove bright fables in the days of old When reason borrowed fancy's painted wings; When truth's clear river flowed o'er sands of gold, And told in song its high and mystic things! And such the sweet and solemn tale of her The pilgrim-heart, to whom a dream was given. That led her through the world, Love's worshipper, To seek on earth for him whose home was heaven!
He was one of the great encouragers of Greek learning, and particularly applauded Ascham's lectures, assuring him in a letter, of which Graunt has preserved an extract, that he would gain more knowledge by explaining one of Æsop's fables to a boy, than by hearing one of Homer's poems explained by another.
Away in the American woods, very likely, whispering some dreamy, credulous youth, telling him charming fables of its locus, and proposing to itself to abandon him as soon as he sets foot upon its native ground.
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