80 THE ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING. 



and mysteries of religion, policy, or philosophy, are involved in 

 fables or parables. Of this in divine poesy we see the use is 

 authorised. In heathen poesy we see the exposition of fables 

 doth fall out sometimes with great felicity : as in the fable 

 that the giants being overthrown in their war against the 

 gods, the earth their mother in revenge thereof brought forth 

 Fame : 



&quot; Illam terra parens, ira irritata Deorum, 

 Extremam, ut perhibent, Coeo Enceladoque sororem, 

 Progenuit.&quot; 



Expounded that when princes and monarchs have suppressed 

 actual and open rebels, then the malignity of people (which is 

 the mother of rebellion) doth bring forth libels and slanders, 

 and taxations of the states, which is of the same kind with 

 rebellion, but more feminine. So in the fable that the rest of 

 the gods having conspired to bind Jupiter, Pallas called Briareus 

 with his hundred hands to his aid : expounded that monarchies 

 need not fear any curbing of their absoluteness by mighty sub 

 jects, as long as by wisdom they keep the hearts of the people, 

 who will be sure to come in on their side. So in the fable that 

 Achilles was brought up under Chiron, the centaur, who was 

 part a man and part a beast, expounded ingeniously but cor 

 ruptly by Machiavel, that it belongeth to the education and 

 discipline of princes to know as well how to play the part of a 

 lion in violence, and the fox in guile, as of the man in virtue 

 and justice. Nevertheless, in many the like encounters, I do 

 rather think that the fable was first, and the exposition devised, 

 than that the moral was first, and thereupon the fable framed ; 

 for I find it was an ancient vanity in Chrysippus, that troubled 

 himself with great contention to fasten the assertions of the 

 Stoics upon the fictions of the ancient poets ; but yet that all 

 the fables and fictions of the poets were but pleasure and not 

 figure, I interpose no opinion. Surely of those poets which are 

 now extant, even Homer himself (notwithstanding he was made 

 a kind of scripture by the later schools of the Grecians), yet I 

 should without any difficulty pronounce that his fables had no 

 such inwardness in his own meaning. But what they might 

 have upon a more original tradition is not easy to affirm, for he 

 was not the inventor of many of them. 



(5) In this third part of learning, which is poesy, I can report 

 no deficience ; for being as a plant that cometh of the lust of the 

 earth, without a formal seed, it hath sprung up and spread 

 abroad more than any other kind. But to ascribe unto it that 

 which is due, for the expressing of affections, passions, corrup* 



