The Age of Fable eBook

Thomas Bulfinch



   “What though Cimmerian anarchs dare blaspheme
    Freedom and thee? a new Actaeon’s error
    Shall theirs have been,—­devoured by their own hounds! 
      Be thou like the imperial basilisk,
    Killing thy foe with unapparent wounds! 
      Gaze on oppression, till at that dread risk,
      Aghast she pass from the earth’s disk. 
    Fear not, but gaze,—­for freemen mightier grow,
    And slaves more feeble, gazing on their foe.”


Pliny, the Roman naturalist, out of whose account of the unicorn most of the modern unicorns have been described and figured, records it as “a very ferocious beast, similar in the rest of its body to a horse, with the head of a deer, the feet of an elephant, the tail of a boar, a deep, bellowing voice, and a single black horn, two cubits in length, standing out in the middle of its forehead.”  He adds that “it cannot be taken alive;” and some such excuse may have been necessary in those days for not producing the living animal upon the arena of the amphitheatre.

The unicorn seems to have been a sad puzzle to the hunters, who hardly knew how to come at so valuable a piece of game.  Some described the horn as movable at the will of the animal, a kind of small sword, in short, with which no hunter who was not exceedingly cunning in fence could have a chance.  Others maintained that all the animal’s strength lay in its horn, and that when hard pressed in pursuit, it would throw itself from the pinnacle of the highest rocks horn foremost, so as to pitch upon it, and then quietly march off not a whit the worse for its fall.

But it seems they found out how to circumvent the poor unicorn at last.  They discovered that it was a great lover of purity and innocence, so they took the field with a young virgin, who was placed in the unsuspecting admirer’s way.  When the unicorn spied her, he approached with all reverence, couched beside her, and laying his head in her lap, fell asleep.  The treacherous virgin then gave a signal, and the hunters made in and captured the simple beast.

Project Gutenberg
The Age of Fable from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
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