Thomas Bulfinch (1796-1867) was the son of the Boston architect Charles Bulfinch. He graduated from Harvard College in 1814, taught school for a time, and after unsettled years in business worked for some three decades as a clerk at the Merchants' Bank in Boston. In his leisure he wrote popular books of mythology and legend for general readers: The Age of Fable (1855), The Age of Chivalry (1858) and Legends of Charlemagne (1863). After his death the three were gathered as Bulfinch's Mythology, the title under which they are still best known.
“But he also saw among so many lost things a great abundance of one thing which men are apt to think they all possess, and do not think it necessary to pray for,--good sense.”
“Orlando fixed his eyes on the hilt of his sword as on a crucifix, and embraced it, and he raised his eyes and appeared like a creature seraphical and transfigured, and bowing his head, he breathed out his pure soul.”
The Age of Fable, or Stories of Gods and Heroes, is Thomas Bulfinch's prose retelling of Greek and Roman mythology, with shorter chapters on Egyptian, Eastern, Norse and Celtic belief, first published in Boston in 1855. Bulfinch, a bank clerk with a Harvard classical education, wrote it so that ordinary readers could understand the mythological allusions in English poetry and speech.
Legends of Charlemagne, or Romance of the Middle Ages, is the third of Thomas Bulfinch's books of legend, published in 1863. It retells in English prose the romances that grew up around Charlemagne and his twelve peers, or paladins, chiefly as the Italian Renaissance poets Luigi Pulci, Matteo Maria Boiardo and Ludovico Ariosto shaped them.
