There were three soothsayers, of the name of Bacis. The most ancient was of Eleus in Boeotia; the second of Athens; and the third of Caphya in Arcadia, who went also by the names of Cydus and Aletes. The most wonderful stories are told of this last.

The following is a proverbial expression:

Anguilla'st, elabitur.

Plaut. in Pseud.

Among the number of strange fancies, is one, attaching to the number ten. The ancients thought, and many of the summer bathers at Brighton and Margate continue to think, that the tenth wave is larger, stronger, and more overwhelming than the other nine. If the military writers talk to us about the decuman legion and the decuman gate, the authors on natural history and agriculture talk of decuman pears being very fine and large; and we are gravely told, that the tenth egg is always the largest. Is not the tenth pig also the most plump of the litter? The decuman gate, we are told, was so called on account of its size. If its dimensions were imposing, its purpose was awful: -"Decumana autem porta quæ appellatur, post prætorium est, per quam delinquentes milites educuntur ad portam."-Veget.

Pomponius Mela tells us of a bandy-legged or baker-kneed nation in Ethiopia. Their name is derived from Tuas. "Ab eo tractu, quem feræ infestant, proximi sunt Himantopodes, inflexi lentis cruribus, quos serpere potius quam ingredi referunt; deinde Pharusii, aliquando, tendente ad Hesperidas Hercule, dites; nunc inculti, et, nisi quod pecore aluntur, admodum inopes."- Lib. iii. cap. ult.

Seneca gives a very humourous account of persons leading a sort of antipodean life, doing every thing by contraries, and living by candle-light. It seems an anticipation of modern hours in the fashionable world: "Excedebat, inquit, cœna ejus diem? Minime! valde enim frugaliter vivebat; nihil consumebat, nisi noctem. Itaque, crebro dicentibus illum quibusdam avarum et sordidum: Vos, inquit, illum et lychnobium dicatis! Non debes admirari, si tantas invenis vitiorum proprietates: varia sunt; innumerabiles habent facies; comprendi eorum genera non possunt.'

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SOUND MORAL DOCTRINES OF THE ANCIENTS.

Αγάπη οὐ ζητεῖ τὰ ἑαυτῆς. — Plato, in Symposio. Whatever we may think respecting the deterioration of style in the time of the Senecas, it seems as if Christian habits of thinking, marked by a more just feeling and philosophy, had thus early made a silent progress in the heathen mind. The following sentiment may indeed be found in anterior authors, but I doubt whether it be any where so simply and correctly stated :—

Nemo tam Divos habuit faventes,
Crastinum ut possit sibi polliceri.

Senec. in Thyeste.

Ovid is not the poet to whom we should preferably recur for morality. Yet the great principle of the connection between occupation and virtue is strongly stated and exemplified by him in his elegiac poem De Remed. Amor. :

Quæritis, Ægisthus quare sit factus adulter?
In promtu caussa est: desidiosus erat.

The illustration is notorious, but strong and pointed. The general doctrine had been previously laid down:

Otia si tollas, periere Cupidinis arcus,
Contemtæque jacent, et sine luce, faces:

Quam platanus vino gaudet, quam populus unda,
limosa canna palustris humo;

Et quam

Tam Venus otia amat.

Seneca, not the tragedian, as quoted by Erasmus, but the philosopher, in the 107th of his epistles, borrows the following sentiment, closely expressed in a single iambic line, from the original Greek of Cleanthes the Stoic, whence Epictetus also transferred it to ch. 77. of his Manual:

Ducunt volentem fata, nolentem trahunt.

POPULAR TRICKS AND SUPERSTITIOUS IMAGINATIONS OF THE ANCIENTS.

Veteres iis quos irridere volebant, cornua dormientibus capiti imponebant, vel caudam vulpis, vel quid simile.-Scaligerana.

THE Sortes Virgilianæ furnish a specimen of Pagan superstition. To enter into any explanation of them might seem like paying the reader a bad compliment: but it may not be so generally known, that under the first race of the French kings, a most profane practice was substituted for the Homeric or Virgilian lots. Three different books of the Bible were taken, for instance, the Prophecies, the Gospels, and the Epistles of St. Paul. Having laid them on the altar of some saint, by way of enhancing the piety of the proceeding, the consulters opened the books at hazard, and entered into a solemn examination of the respective texts, to ascertain in what respects they were applicable to the points they wished to ascertain. It is obvious that this would not always end in mere folly; but that the cunning contrivers of the accidental opening would take care the book should gape at such leaves, as should contain some fact or sentiment which they might wrest to the purposes they designed to promote. Louis le Débonnaire