w, that the lightning sanctifies below.
Stanza xli. line 8.

The Curtian lake and the Ruminal fig-tree in the Forum, having been
touched by lightning, were held sacred, and the memory of the accident
was preserved by a _pateal_, or altar resembling the mouth of a well,
with a little chapel covering the cavity supposed to be made by the
thunder-bolt. Bodies scathed and persons struck dead were thought to be
incorruptible;[594] and a stroke not fatal conferred perpetual dignity
upon the man so distinguished by heaven.[595]

Those killed by lightning were wrapped in a white garment, and buried
where they fell. The superstition was not confined to the worshippers of
Jupiter: the Lombards believed in the omens furnished by lightning; and
a Christian priest confesses that, by a diabolical skill in interpreting
thunder, a seer foretold to Agilulf, duke of Turin, an event which came
to pass, and gave him a queen and a crown.[596] There was, however,
something equivocal in this sign, which the ancient inhabitants of Rome
did not always consider propitious; and as the fears are likely to last
longer than the consolations of superstition, it is not strange that the
Romans of the age of Leo X. should have been so much terrified at some
misinterpreted storms as to require the exhortations of a scholar, who
arrayed all the learning on thunder and lightning to prove the omen
favourable; beginning with the flash which struck the walls of Velitrae;,
and including that which played upon a gate at Florence, and foretold
the pontificate of one of its citizens.[597]

14.

There, too, the Goddess loves in stone.
Stanza xlix. line 1.

The view of the Venus of Medicis instantly suggests the lines in the
_Seasons_; and the comparison of the object with the description proves,
not only the correctness of the portrait, but the peculiar turn of
thought, and, if the term may be used, the sexual imagination of the
descriptive poet. The same conclusion may be deduced from another hint
in the same episode of Musidora; for Thomson's notion of the privileges
of favoured love must have been either very primitive, or rather
deficient in delicacy, when he made his grateful nymph inform her
discreet Damon that in some happier moment he might perhaps be the
companion of her bath:--

"The time may come you need n