Life & Wisdom Quote by Thomas Bulfinch

Mythology, for Bulfinch, isn’t a rival to truth; it’s the glamorous staffer making literature look inevitable. Calling it a "handmaid" is doing a lot of work: it demotes myth from sacred authority to disciplined service, useful precisely because it’s pliable. Myth supplies the archetypes, the plot engines, the symbolic shorthand that lets writers compress whole moral universes into a single apple, labyrinth, or lightning bolt. Bulfinch’s intent is partly curricular. In the 19th century, classical references were the password to educated conversation, and Bulfinch built a bridge for readers who didn’t grow up fluent in Homer.

Then comes the bolder move: literature as an "ally of virtue" and a "promoter of happiness". That’s not naive cheerleading so much as a cultural argument for why stories matter in a society anxious about moral drift and social change. Bulfinch writes in an era when the novel is booming, literacy is expanding, and Protestant America is negotiating what to do with pagan material. His framing baptizes the Greeks and Romans as ethical infrastructure: you can borrow their gods without importing their worship.

The subtext is defensive and aspirational at once. Defensive, because myth needs permission to enter respectable homes and classrooms; aspirational, because literature is positioned as moral technology, a way to train empathy, self-command, and taste. Virtue here isn’t abstract goodness; it’s the civic version - the habits and sentiments that keep people governable and life bearable. Bulfinch sells mythology as cultural capital with a conscience.