Quotes from Thomas Bulfinch

The reader will, we apprehend, by this time have had enough of absurdities.

a ship without ballast is tossed hither and thither on the sea, so the chariot, without its accustomed weight, was dashed about as if empty. They

but the beauty of the youngest was so wonderful that the poverty of language is unable to express its due praise.

wonderful to relate)

The laws of war at that early day did not forbid a brave man to slay a sleeping foe

You may make as many fair speeches as you choose, but you lie.

In the reign of Cecrops, the first king of Athens, the two deities contended for the possession of the city. The gods decreed that it should be awarded to that one who produced the gift most useful to mortals. Neptune gave the horse; Minerva produced the olive. The gods gave judgment that the olive was the more useful of the two, and awarded the city to the goddess.

libations of milk and wine.

yield the lady, or prepare to maintain his right by arms.

he contended only for glory, and was contented to leave him the lady.

Never did man make worse use of his wits than thou hast done.

Then he struck her with a magic wand, and she was changed back into a young woman, the fairest ever seen.

Thus," said she, "shall be treated the deceiver, the traitor, the faithless, the disgraced, and the beardless.

The Emperor was unreasonably partial to his eldest son; he would have been glad to have had the barons and peers demand Charlot for their only sovereign; but that prince was so infamous, for his falsehood and cruelty, that the council strenuously opposed the Emperor's proposal of abdicating, and implored him to continue to hold a sceptre which he wielded with so much glory.

There was, however, one drawback to his happy lot: he was not permitted to live beyond a certain period, and if, when he had attained the age of twenty-five years, he still survived, the priests drowned him in the sacred cistern and then buried him in the temple of Serapis.

ON the decline of the Roman power, about five centuries after Christ, the countries of Northern Europe were left almost destitute of a national government.

If no other knowledge deserves to be called useful but that which helps to enlarge our possessions or to raise our station in society, then Mythology has no claim to the appellation.

The earliest form in which romances appear is that of a rude kind of verse.