e is"? (St John iii.)

So in literature we have, springing from this principle of comparison,
the forms fable, parable, and allegory; and in language the figures of
speech which we know as simile and metaphor.

Ovid, a Roman poet who lived before the Incarnation, tells the old
Eastern fable thus:

"There is a bird that restores and reproduces itself; the Assyrians call
it the Phoenix. It feeds on no common food, but on the choicest of
gums and spices; and after a life of secular length (_i.e._, a hundred
years) it builds in a high tree with cassia, spikenard, cinnamon, and
myrrh, and on this nest it expires in sweetest odours. A young Phoenix
rises and grows, and when strong enough it takes up the nest with its
deposit and bears it to the City of the Sun, and lays it down there in
front of the sacred portals."

It was a much later and a much longer version of the story that our
English poet was debtor to. It was written in Latin by Lactantius, and
the fable there, Professor Earle says, "is so curiously and, as it
were, significantly elaborated, that we hardly know whether we are
reading a Christian allegory or no."

He goes on to say that Allegory has always been a favourite form with
Christian writers, and finds more than one reason for it. There was a
tendency towards symbolism in literature outside Christianity when the
Christian literature arose. Another reason was that the early Christians
used it to convey what it would probably have endangered their lives to
set in plain words; besides this--here I must give the Professor's own
beautiful words--"Christian thought had in its own nature something
which invited allegory, partly by its own hidden sympathies with nature,
and partly by its very immensity, for which all direct speech was felt
to be inadequate." One more reason he suggests, and that is "the
all-pervading and unspeakable sweetness of Christ's teaching by
parables."

The Romans used the representation of the phoenix on coins to signify
the desire for fresh life and vigour, and Christian writers used the
phoenix as an emblem of the Resurrection.

Many scholars think that it was Cynewulf who wrote the Anglo-Saxon poem
of "The Phoenix." We are, however, uncertain as to its authorship and
as to its date. Whoever wrote it probably took some hints as to the
allegorical interpretation of the story from both St Ambrose and St
Bede. And this poet, too, gives us much more brightness and colour than
we find