That so tragical an end should excite general attention, that it should be referred to the direct interposition of the Deity to punish some crime, is no wonder: what is chiefly observable, and characteristic of Grecian religion, is that no one thought of attributing the anger of the gods to moral guilt, of which Cleomenes had no lack, but merely to some injury or insult offered especially to the gods themselves. Hence, according to the religious prepossessions of the party speculating, there were four methods current of accounting for his madness. Some time before, when commanding in an invasion of Argolis, he had defeated the opposing army, and driven many of them into a wood sacred to the hero Argus (not he with the many eyes), from whom the Argians traced their descent. Unwilling to lose his prey, he at first enticed them one by one with promises of safety, and when his treachery was discovered, and they refused to quit their asylum, he caused the Helots attendant on the army to surround the grove with dry wood, and burnt it together with the wretches it contained. The Argians then said that the hero Argus thus avenged the pollution and destruction of his grove: the Athenians were equally confident that he was thus afflicted because he had once ravaged the sacred precincts of Eleusis: the other Greeks, who cared comparatively little either for Argus or Ceres, found a sufficient cause in his corruption of the Delphian oracle, which was consulted and venerated by all alike. And the Spartans, bigoted to nothing so much as to their own institutions, probably stumbled upon the truth when they said that there was nothing divine about the business, but that he was driven mad by hard drinking. A similar feeling led the royalists to see something extraordinary in the death of Lord Brooke, who was killed by a musket–shot in the eye, fired from Lichfield Cathedral, while besieging it for the Parliament in 1643. “There were many discourses and observations upon his death, that it should be upon St. Chad’s day, being the 2nd of March, by whose name, he being a bishop shortly after the planting of Christianity in this island, that church had anciently been called. And it was reported that in his prayer that very morning (for he used to pray publicly, though his chaplain were in the presence), he wished ‘that if the cause he were in were not right and just, he might presently be cut off.’” Others went still further, and observed not only that he was killed in attacking St. Chad’s church on St. Chad’s day, but that he received his death–wound in the very eye with which he had said he hoped to see the ruin of all the cathedrals in the kingdom. It is observable that the honour of the tutelary saint seems to have been more thought of than that of the Deity.