London, July 8.
[Footnote 1: For the assistance of the general reader, I have introduced
hasty translations of the several passages quoted.]
[Footnote 2: (And I moreover tell you, and do you meditate well upon it,
that) you yourself are not destined to live long, for even now death is
drawing nigh unto you, and a violent fate awaits you,--about to be slain
in fight by the hands of Achilles, the irreproachable son of Oacus.]
[Footnote 3: Consider now whether I may not be to you the cause of
divine anger, in that day when Paris and Phoebus Apollo shall slay you,
albeit so mighty, at the Scaean gate.]
[Footnote 4: Wherefore I have an earnest desire to prophesy to you who
have condemned me; for I am already arrived at that stage of my
existence in which, especially, men utter prophetic sayings, that is,
when they are about to die.]
[Footnote 5: That time, indeed, the soul of man appears to be in a
manner divine, for to a certain extent it foresees things which are
about to happen.]
[Footnote 6: Pythagoras the Samian, and some others of the ancient
philosophers, showed that the souls of men were immortal, and that, when
they were on the point of separating from the body, they possessed a
knowledge of futurity.]
[Footnote 7: The soul, says Aristotle, when on the point of taking its
departure from the body, foretells and prophesies things about to
happen.]
* * * * *
_Divination at Marriages_.--The following practices are very prevalent
at marriages in these districts; and as I do not find them noticed by
Brand in the last edition of his _Popular Antiquities_, they may perhaps
be thought worthy a place in the "NOTES AND QUERIES."
1. Put a wedding ring into the _posset_, and after serving it out, the
unmarried person whose cup contains the ring will be the first of the
company to be married.
2. Make a common flat cake of flour, water, currants, &c., and put
therein a wedding ring and a sixpence. When the company is about to
retire on the wedding-day, the cake must be broken and distributed
amongst the unmarried females. She who gets the ring in her portion of
the cake will shortly be married, and the one who gets the sixpence will
die an old maid.