to shirk their inevitable lot, resort to injustice. "If the gods had not ordained toil, men might stow away their boat-paddles over the smoke, and there would be an end to ploughing with mules and oxen:"—
With fraud illusive had incensed his heart;
Sore ills to man devised the heavenly sire,
And hid the shining element of fire.
Prometheus then, benevolent of soul,
In hollow reed the spark recovering stole,
And thus the god beguiled, whose awful gaze
Serene rejoices in the lightning blaze."
—E. 67-74.
Till the Titan's offence, toil and sickness and human ills had been unknown; but after that transgression they were introduced—as sin into the world through our mother Eve—by Zeus's "beauteous evil," Pandora, The Father creates her, and the immortals rival each other in the gifts that shall make her best adapted for her work of witchery, and presently send her as a gift to Epimetheus, the personification of "Unreflection," who takes her in spite of the remonstrances of his elder and more foresighted brother, Prometheus. If, as has been suggested, we may take the wise Prometheus to represent the poet, and Perses to be implied in the weaker Epimetheus—and if, too, in Pandora there is a covert allusion to the foolish wife of Perses, who encouraged his extravagance, and seems to have inspired Hesiod with an aversion for her sex—it will bring home the more closely the pertinence of this myth to the moral lesson which, in the first part of
