Religion truly fortifies men's minds,
And a wise man to valiant acts inclines,
and gives not occasion of fear to any but weak and foolish persons and such as are ungrateful to the Deity, who are apt to look on that divine power and principle which is the cause of all good with suspicion and jealousy, as being hurtful unto them. And so much for that which I call correction of poets' sayings.
There is yet another way of improving poems, taught us well by Chrysippus; which is, by accommodation of any saying, to transfer that which is useful and serviceable in it to divers things of the same kind. For whereas Hesiod saith,
If but a cow miscarry, the common fame
Upon the next ill neighbor lays the blame;
(Hesiod, "Work and Days," 348.)
the same may be applied to a man's dog or ass or any other beast of his which is liable to the like mischance. Again, Euripides saith,
How can that man be called a slave, who slights
Ev'n death itself, which servile spirits frights?
the like whereof may be said of hard labor or painful sickness. For as physicians, finding by experience the force of any medicine in the cure of some one disease, make use of it by accommodation, proportionably to every other disease of affinity thereto, so are we to deal with such speeches as are of a common import and apt to communicate their value to other things; we must not confine them to that one thing only to which they were at first adapted, but transfer them to all other of like nature, and accustom young men by many parallel instances to see the communicableness of them, and exercise the promptness of their wits in such applications so that when Menander says,
Happy is he who wealth and wisdom hath,
they may be able to judge that the same is fitly applicable to glory and authority and eloquence also. And the reproof which Ulysses gives Achilles, when he found him sitting in Scyrus in the apartment of the young ladies,
Thou, who from noblest Greeks deriv'st thy race,
Dost thou with spinning wool thy birth disgrace?