"O Pallas, thou hast failed thy plighted word, To fight with caution, not to tempt the sword; I warn'd thee, but in vain, for well I knew What perils youthful ardour would pursue; That boiling blood would carry thee too far, Young as thou wert to dangers, raw to war; O curs'd essay of arms, disastrous doom, Prelude of bloody fields and fights to come, Hard elements of unauspicious war, Vain vows to heaven and unavailing care." How the most pious man of his age, and one of the best kings that ever adorned a throne, suffered death at the hands of his rebellious subjects is well known. Poor Lord Falkland--a young nobleman of the most estimable character; a poet and man of letters, so fond of books that he used to say that "he pitied unlearned gentlemen in a rainy day"--fell gallantly fighting for the royal cause in the battle of Newbury, before he had yet completed his thirty-fourth year. It is curious to find the eminent poet Abraham Cowley, a good man too--of whom at his death Charles II. was heard to say that "Mr. Cowley had not left a better man behind in England,"--it is curious, we say, to find him on a certain occasion seriously referring to the Virgilian Lots, and, what is more, avowing his firm belief in them! During the Commonwealth, Cowley was in Paris, where he acted as secretary to the Earl of St. Albans (then Lord Jermyn), and had a good deal to do with the negotiations that eventually led to the Restoration. In one of his letters, speaking of the Scotch treaty then in agitation, he says--seriously, observe, and in an official document--"The Scotch treaty is the only thing now in which we are vitally concerned. I am one of the last hopers, and yet cannot now abstain from believing that an agreement will be made; all people upon the place incline to that union. The Scotch will moderate something of the rigour of their demands; the mutual necessity of an accord is visible, the king is persuaded of it. And, to tell you the truth (which I take to be an argument above all the rest), Virgil has told the same thing to that purpose." He had evidently consulted the Virgilian Lots, and a passage presenting itself that could somehow be twisted so as to point to a favourable issue to the Scotch business in hand, he accepts the oracle, and in all seriousness announces his belief in it! When we find a man of refinement and culture and high moral character like Cowley crediting such nonsense, can we much wonder at the lengths to which fanaticism and superstition carried people in those unhappy times? To understand why Virgil, of all the ancient poets, Roman or Greek, was selected as the oracle in this mode of divination, we must remember that the Mantuan bard had the credit amongst his countrymen of having been a sorcerer or necromancer and prophet as well as a poet, something like the British Merlin, or our own Thomas the Rhymer and Michael Scott, only more famous, perhaps. "Would the