APPLICATION.
My beloved, any good Christian strong and powerful in virtues communicated at his baptism, may be called Alexander. He is strong and powerful as long as he preserves his purity from the contamination of the devil, the world, and the flesh. The Queen of the North is a superfluity of the things of life, which sometimes destroys the spirit, and generally the body. The envenomed beauty is Luxury and Gluttony, which feed men with delicacies, that are poison to the soul. Aristotle is thy conscience, or reason, which reproves and opposes the union that would undo the soul. The malefactor is a perverse man, disobedient to his God, and more diligent in pursuing his own carnal delights than the divine commands. He enfolds his sins in a close embrace, by whose deadly touch he is spiritually destroyed. So the Book of Wisdom: "He who touches pitch shall be defiled by it." Let us then study to live honestly and uprightly, in order that we may attain to everlasting life.
TALE XII.
OF BAD EXAMPLE
In the reign of Otho there was a certain slippery priest, who created much disturbance among his parishioners, and many were extremely scandalized. One of them, in particular, always absented himself from Mass, when it fell to the priest's turn to celebrate it. Now, it happened on a festival day, during the time of Mass, that as this person
said to have treacherously sent to Alexander, among other costly presents, the pretended testimonies of her friendship, a girl of exquisite beauty, who having been fed with serpents from her infancy, partook of their nature. If I recollect right, in Pliny there are accounts of nations whose natural food was poison. Mithridates, king of Pontus, the land of venomous herbs, and the country of the sorceress Medea, was supposed to eat poison. Sir John Mandeville's Travels, I believe, will afford other instances."—Warton. [Mr. O. Wendell Holmes has made use of this weird notion in his novel, "Elsie Venner."—Ed.]
