Page:Plutarch's Lives (Clough, v.1, 1865).djvu/35

adjoining to the before mentioned, which was inhabited by some few Britons, (but those held sacred and inviolable by all their countrymen,) immediately after his arrival, the air grew black and troubled, strange apparitions were seen, the winds raised a tempest, and fiery spouts or whirlwinds appeared dancing towards the earth. When these prodigies were ceased, the islanders informed him that some one of the aerial beings, superior to our nature, then ceased to live. For as a taper, while yet burning, affords a pleasant, harmless light, but is noisome and offensive when extinguished, so those heroes shine benignly on us and do us good, but at their death turn all things topsy-turvy, raise up tempests, and infect the air with pestilential vapors. By those holy and inviolable men, there is no question but he means our Druids, who were nearest to the Pythagoreans of any sect; and this opinion of the Genii might probably be one of theirs. Yet it proves not that all daemons were thus malicious, only those who were to be condemned hereafter into human bodies, for their misdemeanors in their aerial being. But 'tis time to leave a subject so very fanciful, and so little reasonable as this. I am apt to imagine the natural vapors, arising in the cave where the temple afterwards was built, might work upon the spirits of those who entered the holy place, as they did on the shepherd Coretas, who first found it out by accident, and incline them to Enthusiasm and prophetic madness; that as the strength of those vapors diminished, (which were generally in caverns, as that of Mopsus, of Trophonius, and this of Delphos,) so the inspiration decreased by the same measures; that they happened to be stronger when .they killed the Pythias, who being conscious of this, was so unwilling to enter; that the oracles ceased to be given in verse when poets ceased to be the priests, and that the Genius of Socrates (whom he confessed never to have seen, but only to