The power, the beauty, and the majesty
That had their haunts in dale, or piny mountain,
Or forest by slow stream, or pebbly spring,
Or chasms and watery depths,’
never existed except in the imagination of modern poets. The beings intended were the ‘fair humanities’ of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, whose attributes, derived from the baser parts of our nature, were human passions lawlessly indulged, accompanied with more than mortal power. Gibbon, who was any thing rather than what he affected to be—a philosopher—speaks of ‘the elegant mythology of the Greeks.’ The great fountains of their popular and poetical mythology were Homer and Hesiod. Hesiod does not surpass Homer in the agreeable or moral character of his fictions; and, as regards the elegance of the mythology found in the great epic poet, a single passage, if we had no other means of judging, might settle the question, the address of Jupiter to Juno at the commencement of the Fifteenth Book of the Iliad:—
‘Oh, versed in wiles,
Juno! thy mischief-teeming mind perverse
Hath plotted this; thou hast contrived the hurt
Of Hector, and hast driven his host to flight.
I know not but thyself mayst chance to reap