Chinese mythology merely fantastic types of the bestiary sort. Sometimes the dragon is considered part of this category, related to it, or the ruler of all the swimming and crawling folk. This may include the giant marine turtle or tortoise Ao, the Bashe snake reputed to swallow elephants, a nine-headed snake monster reminiscent of the hydra known as Xiangliu, and the White Serpent from the novel "Legend of the White Snake". Various birds are found in Chinese mythology, some of them obviously based on real birds, other ones obviously not, and some in-between. The Crane is an example of a real type
Greek mythology in western art and literature for all things Greek, including Greek mythology. In Britain, it was a great period for new translations of Greek tragedies and Homer's works, and these in turn inspired contemporary poets, such as Keats, Byron, and Shelley. The Hellenism of Queen Victoria's poet laureate, Alfred Lord Tennyson, was such that even his portraits of the quintessentially English court of King Arthur are suffused with echoes of the Homeric epics. The visual arts kept pace, stimulated by the purchase of the Parthenon marbles in 1816; many of the "Greek" paintings of Lord Leighton and Lawrence Alma-Tadema were seriously accepted as part of