The “Sortes Virgilianæ” were long in use, often as a fashionable pastime, sometimes in graver earnest: the inquirer opened the volume at random, and took for the answer of fate the first few lines which caught his eye. In the times of the later Roman emperors, they ranked among the most popular, and perhaps the least objectionable, of the many superstitious practices which were then so prevalent. The Emperor Severus was said to have been encouraged in his boyhood by the very words which had such an effect on Octavia--“Thou shalt be our Marcellus!” And when subsequently he showed a taste rather for elegant accomplishments than for military renown, again the “Sortes,” consulted for him by his father, gave the well-known lines already quoted,[44] in which the glory of the Roman is pronounced to be that of the conqueror, not of the student or the artist. The superstition held its ground, through the middle ages, down to times very near our own. The story rests upon no mean authority, that Charles I. once tried the oracle with a startling result. He was in the Bodleian Library while the Court lay in Oxford, and was there shown a splendid edition of Virgil. Lord Falkland suggested to him sportively that he should try the “Sortes.” The lines upon which the king opened are said to have been these, as they stand in Mr Conington’s version:-- “Scourged by a savage enemy, An exile from his son’s embrace, So let him sue for aid, and see His people slain before his face: Or when to humbling peace at length He stoops, be his or life or land, But let him fall in manhood’s strength, And welter tombless on the sand.” It was a gloomy oracle; and Falkland, anxious to remove the impression, tried his own fortune. He lighted on Evander’s lament over his son Pallas:-- “I knew the young blood’s maddening play, The charm of battle’s first essay; O valour blighted in the flower! O first mad drops of war’s full shower!” A few months afterwards Falkland fell at the battle of Newbury, barely thirty-four years old. There has always been a mystical school of classical interpretation, who see in the Æneid, as in the Iliad and Odyssey, a tissue of allegory from first to last. Not content with identifying the Trojan chief with Augustus, they found a double meaning in every character and every legend in the poem. Bishop Warburton, in his well-known ‘Divine Legation,’ expended a great amount of learning and research to prove that in the Descent to the Shades in the sixth book we have a sketch, scarcely veiled, of the great Eleusinian mysteries. Others saw in Dido the love-passion and the fate of Cleopatra, Antony in Turnus, the flight of Marius to the marshes in the person of Sinon, the miserable end of Pompey in Priam-- “The head shorn off, the trunk without a name.”