,
Vela reducuntur, cum venit Hermogenes."

["The curtains, though the sun should scorch the spectators, are
drawn in, when Hermogenes appears."-Martial, xii. 29, 15. M.
Tigellius Hermogenes, whom Horace and others have satirised. One
editor calls him "a noted thief," another: "He was a literary
amateur of no ability, who expressed his critical opinions with too
great a freedom to please the poets of his day." D.W.]

The network also that was set before the people to defend them from the
violence of these turned-out beasts was woven of gold:

"Auro quoque torts refulgent
Retia."

["The woven nets are refulgent with gold."
--Calpurnius, ubi supra.]

If there be anything excusable in such excesses as these, it is where the
novelty and invention create more wonder than the expense; even in these
vanities we discover how fertile those ages were in other kind of wits
than these of ours. It is with this sort of fertility, as with all other
products of nature: not that she there and then employed her utmost
force: we do not go; we rather run up and down, and whirl this way and
that; we turn back the way we came. I am afraid our knowledge is weak in
all senses; we neither see far forward nor far backward; our
understanding comprehends little, and lives but a little while; 'tis
short both in extent of time and extent of matter:

"Vixere fortes ante Agamemnona
Mufti, sed omnes illacrymabiles
Urgentur, ignotique longs
Nocte."

[ Many brave men lived before Agamemnon, but all are pressed by the
long night unmourned and unknown."--Horace, Od., iv. 9, 25.]

"Et supra bellum Thebanum et funera Trojae
Non alias alii quoque res cecinere poetae?"

["Why before the Theban war and the destruction of Troy, have not
other poets sung other events?"--Lucretius, v. 327. Montaigne here
diverts himself m giving Lucretius' words a construction directly
contrary to what they bear in the poem. Lucretius puts the
question, Why if the earth had existed from all eternity, there had
not been poets, before the Theban war, to sing men's exploits.
--Coste.]

And the narrative of Solon, of what he had learned from the Egyptian
priests, touching the long life of their state, a