COWLEY.
xi
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."
This expression from a secretary of the present time would be considered as merely ludicrous, or at most as an ostentatious display of scholarship; but the manners of that time were so tinged with superstition, that I cannot but suspect Cowley of having consulted on this great occasion the Virgilian Lots[1], and to have given some credit to the answer of his oracle.
- ↑ Virgilian Lots (Sortes Virgilianæ) is a method of divination by the opening of Virgil, and applying to the circumstances of the peruser the first passage in either of the two pages that he accidentally fixes his eye on. King Charles I. and lord Falkland, being in the Bodleian library, made this experiment of their future fortunes, and met with passages equally ominous to each. That of the king was the following:At bello audacis populi vexatus & armis,
Finibus extorris, complexu avulsus luli,
