impulse from a variety of the _Sortes Virgilianæ_. This variety was known in early times to the Jews--as early, indeed, as the era of the Grecian Pericles, if we are to believe the Talmud. It is known familiarly to this day amongst Polish Jews, and is called _Bathcol_, or the _daughter of a voice_; the meaning of which appellation is this:--The _Urim and Thummim_, or oracle in the breast-plate of the high priest, spoke directly from God. It was, therefore, the original or mother-voice. But about the time of Pericles, that is, exactly one hundred years before the time of Alexander the Great, the light of prophecy was quenched in Malachi or Haggai; and the oracular jewels in the breast-plate became simultaneously dim. Henceforwards the mother-voice was heard no longer: but to this succeeded an imperfect or daughter-voice, (_Bathcol_,) which lay in the first words happening to arrest the attention at a moment of perplexity. An illustration, which has been often quoted from the Talmud, is to the following effect:--Rabbi Tochanan, and Rabbi Simeon Ben Lachish, were anxious about a friend, Rabbi Samuel, six hundred miles distant on the Euphrates. Whilst talking earnestly together on this subject in Palestine, they passed a school; they paused to listen: it was a child reading the first book of Samuel; and the words which they caught were these--_And Samuel died_. These words they received as a _Bath-col_: and the next horseman from the Euphrates brought word accordingly that Rabbi Samuel had been gathered to his fathers at some station on the Euphrates. Here is the very same case, the same _Bath-col_ substantially, which we have cited from Orton's _Life of Doddridge_. And Du Cange himself notices, in his Glossary, the relation which this bore to the Pagan _Sortes_. 'It was,' says he, 'a fantastical way of divination, invented by the Jews, not unlike the _Sortes Virgilianæ_ of the heathens. For, as with them the first words they happened to dip into in the works of that poet were a kind of oracle whereby they predicted future events,--so, with the Jews, when they appealed to _Bath-col_, the first words they heard from any one's mouth were looked upon as a voice from Heaven directing them in the matter they inquired about.'