Note 245 — NEW ENGLISH CANAAN OR NEW CANAAN.
Reading edition
Thomas May, better known as the historian and secretary of the Long Parliament, was born in 1595 and died in 1650. In 1627 he published a translation of Lucan’s Pharsalia, with a supplementum, or continuation (1630), by himself in seven books. This continuation he subsequently translated into Latin, and it is included in Lemaire’s edition of the Pharsalia in his Bibliotheca Classica Latina (Paris, 1832). The passage to which Morton refers is in the third book of the continuation (ll. 108-78). The following are some of the verses:—
“But in a higher kind (as some relate) Do Elephants with men communicate. (If you believe it) a religion They have, and monthly do adore the Moon, Besides the loftie Nabathæan wood, Of vast extent, Amylo’s gentle flood, Gliding along, the sandie mould combines. Thither, as oft as waxing Cynthia shines In her first borrowed light, from out the wood, Come all the Elephants, and in the floud Washing themselves (as if to purifie) They prostrate fall; and when religiously They have adored the Moon, return again Into the woods with joy.”