Shameful Creation

Therefore Promethean Poets with the coles
Of their most geniale, more-then-humane soules
In living verse, created men like these,
With shapes of Centaurs, Harpies, Lapithes,
That they in prime of erudition,
When almost savage vulgar men were growne,
Seeing them selves in those Pieran founts,
Might mend their mindes, asham'd of such accounts.

  ---George Chapman, Hymnus in Noctem, lns. 131-8.