Call it a good marriage - For no one ever questioned Her warmth, his masculinity, Their interlocking views; Except one stray graphologist Who frowned… - Robert Graves

Children born of fairy stock
Never need for shirt or frock
Never want for food or fire
Always get their heart's desire
Jingle pockets full of gold
Marry when they're seven years old
Every fairy child may keep
Two strong ponies and ten sheep
All have houses, each his own
Built of brick or granite stone
They live on cherries, they run wild
I'd love to be a fairy's child

While altering the saga of Odysseus’s Return to make my Elyman suitors serve as Penelope’s lovers, I had to protect myself against scandal. What if someone recognized the story and supposed that I, Nausicaa the irreproachable, had played the promiscuous harlot in my father’s absence? So, according to my poem, Penelope must have remained faithful to Odysseus throughout those twenty years. And because this change meant that Aphrodite had failed to take her traditional revenge, I must make Poseidon, not her, the enemy who delayed him on his homeward voyage after the Fall of Troy. I should therefore have to omit the stories of Penelope’s banishment and the oar mistaken for a flail, and Odysseus’s death from Telemachus’s sting-ray spear. When I told Phemius of these decisions, he pointed out, rather nastily, that since Poseidon had fought for the Greeks against the Trojans, and since Odysseus had never failed to honour him, I must justify this enmity by some anecdote. “Very well,” I answered. “Odysseus blinded a Cyclops who, happening to be Poseidon’s son, prayed to him for vengeance.” “My dear Princess, every Cyclops in the smithies of Etna was born to Uranus, Poseidon’s grandfather, by Mother Earth.” “Mine was an exceptional Cyclops,” I snapped. “He claimed Poseidon as his father and kept sheep in a Sican cave, like Conturanus. I shall call him Polyphemus — that is, ‘famous’ — to make my hearers think him a more important character than he really was.” “Such deceptions tangle the web of poetry.” “But if I offer Penelope as a shining example for wives to follow when their husbands are absent on long journeys, that will excuse the deception.

Malthus's school was in the centre of the town of Adrianople, and was not one of those monkish schools where education is miserably limited to the bread and water of the Holy Scriptures. Bread is good and water is good, but the bodily malnutrition that may be observed in prisoners or poor peasants who are reduced to this diet has its counterpart in the spiritual malnutrition of certain clerics. These can recite the genealogy of King David of the Jews as far back as Deucalion's Flood, and behind the Flood to Adam, without a mistake, or can repeat whole chapters of the Epistles of Saint Paul as fluently as if they were poems written in metre; but in all other respects are as ignorant as fish or birds.