We take Apollo, and Mercury and Venus, as shapes that existed in popular credulity, as the greater fairies of the ancient world: and we regard them, at the same time, as personifications of all that is beautiful and genial in the forms and tendencies of creation. […] These sages who considered philosophy to consist in the science of practising virtue, and living happily, endeavoured to show by the adventures of the tripod that, though the way was sometimes different, the end was the same. […] The most celebrated of her temples was that at Ephesus, which from its grandeur and magnificence has been placed among the seven wonders of the world, but was burned by Erostratus, the same day that Alexander the Great was born. […] Achilles would have shared the same fate, if Peleus had not snatched him from her hand, as she was going to repeat the cruel operation. […] The Gods, touched by her fidelity, changed her and her husband into the birds of the same name, who keep the waters calm and serene while they build and sit on their nests in the surface of the sea.