II THE ARREST OF ENQUIRY 57 



to be sprinkled (Middleton had his own horses thus 

 blest ' for about eighteenpence of our money ') there is 

 the survival of a ceremony in the Circensian games. 

 In the lamps and wax candles before the shrines of 

 the Madonna and Saints he is reminded of a passage 

 in Herodotus as to the use of lights in the Egyptian 

 temples, while we know that lamps to the Madonna 

 took the place of those before the images of the 

 Lares, whose chapels stood at the corners of the 

 streets. The Synod of Elviri (305 A.D.) forbade the 

 lighting of wax candles during the day in cemeteries 

 lest the spirits of the saints should be disquieted, but 

 the custom was too deeply -rooted to be abolished. 

 As for votive offerings, Middleton truly says that ' no 

 one custom of antiquity is so frequently mentioned 

 by all their writers ' . . . ' but the most common 

 of all offerings were pictures representing the history 

 of the miraculous cure or deliverance vouchsafed 

 upon the vow of the donor.' Of which offerings, the 

 blessed Virgin is so sure always to carry off the 

 greatest share, that it may be truly said of her what 

 Juvenal says of the Goddess fsis, whose religion was 

 at that time in the greatest vogue in Rome, that the 

 painters got their livelihood out oj her.* Middleton 

 tells the story from Cicero which, not without covert 

 sympathy, Montaigne quotes in his Essay on * Prog- 

 nostications.' Diagoras, surnamed the Atheist, being 

 found one day in a temple, was thus addressed by a 

 friend : ' You, who think the gods take no care of 

 human affairs, do not you see here by this number 

 of pictures how many people, for the sake of their 

 vows, have been saved in storms at sea, and got safe 

 into harbour ? ' ' Yes/ answered Diagoras, ' I see 



