A ROMAN LEGEND. 
169 
The owle eke, that of death the bode 
bringeth : " 
and Spenser, — 
" The rueful stritch, still wailing on the bier; 
The whistler shrill, that whoso hears doth 
die. " 
And in " Hudibras " Butler has a 
lively reference to the superstitions S 
of the Romans : — - M 
" The Roman senate, when within \ 
The city walls an owl was seen, 
Did cause their clergy with lustrations 
(Our synod calls humiliations) 
The round-faced prodigy t' avert 
From doing town and country hurt." 
But from the days when Romulus and Remus agreed that a flight 
of birds should decide the possession of the infant Rome, ornithomancy 
— as Ennemoser calls it — was held in great esteem by Roman philo- 
sophers, statesmen, warriors, poets, and citizens. Virgil consecrates in a 
tenderly-beautiful passage the popular belief in the prophetic character 
