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188 father, gave the well-known lines already quoted, 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.