Moreover, there is always a twofold Condition propounded with Sphynx her Enigmas. To him that doth not expound them, distraction of Mind, and to him that doth, a Kingdom, for he that knows that which he sought to know hath attain’d the end he aim’d at, and every Artificer also commands over his Work.
Moreover it is added in the Fable, that the Body of Sphynx, when she was overcome, was laid upon an Ass, which indeed is an elegant Fiction, seeing there is nothing so acute and abstruse but, being well understood and divulged, may be well apprehended by a slow Capacity. Neither is it to be omitted that Sphynx was overcome by a Man lame in his Feet; for when Men are too swift of Foot and too speedy of Pace in hasting to Sphynx, her Enigmas, it comes to pass that, she getting the upper Hand, their Wits and Minds are rather distracted by Disputations than that ever they come to command by Works and Effects.”
I.
The spaces in the frieze of the Parthenon, known architectively as the metopes, were filled with sculptures illustrating the struggle between the Lapithæ and the Centaurs. Thirty-nine of these slabs remain in their original position in the temple, while seventeen are in the British Museum and one in the Louvre. In their beauty and bold design they are some of the grandest monuments of Greek art. Other very fine examples may be seen in the fragments in our national collection from the frieze of the temple of Apollo Epicurius, near Phigalia, and the Theseum at Athens. There are also two very fine single statues of centaurs in the Capitoline Museum.
J.
Centaury is so called from an old myth that Chiron, the centaur, cured himself from a wound given by a poisoned arrow by using some plant that Pliny, therefore, calls Centaurium; but whether it was this plant, or a knapweed, or any plant at all, or whether there even ever was a centaur named Chiron, or a centaur named anything else, are points we must be content to leave. Linnæus called the plant the Chironia; its modern generic name merely signifies red, as most of the flowers in the genus have blossoms of some tint of red; but in the specific name Centaurium we recognise that the old myth still finds commemoration. In some parts of England the rustics corrupt centaury into sanctuary, and the Germans call it the tausend-gulden-kraut. This strange name is built upon another corruption, some of the old writers having twisted Centaurea into Centum aurei, and the Germans have lavishly multiplied by ten the hundred golden coins. The centaury is said to be a good and cheap substitute for the medicinal gentian, and, as a hair-dye, was for a long time held in repute for the production of a rich golden yellow tint.
“My floure is sweet in smell, bitter my iuyce in taste,
Which purge choler, and helps liuer, that else would waste.”
The centaury still figures largely in rustic medicine and in the prescriptions of the herbalists; we have seen the country agents of these latter with armfuls of centaury as large as they could carry. Into all its accredited virtues in mediæval times we need not here go; in fact, if our readers will make out at random a list of some twenty of the ills of suffering mortality, and boldly assert that such ills need not exist at all in a world that also produces centaury, they will be sufficiently near the mark for practical purposes.