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272 MONTAIGNE'S ESSAYES
Besmeared with bloud and goare.
Th' Athenians Pallas ; Minos-Candy coast
Diana; Lemnos Vulcan honors most;
Mycene and Sparta, Juno thinke divine;
The coast of Mcenalus Fauns crown'd with pine;
Latium doth Mars adore.
Some hath hut one borough or family in his possession:
some lodgeth alone, and some in company, either
voluntarily or necessarily.
lunctaque sunt magno templa nepotis avo, 1
To the great grand-sires shrine,
The nephews temples doe combine.
Some there are so seely and popular (for their
number amounteth to six and thirty thousand) that
five or six of them must he shufled up together to
produce an eare of corne, and thereof they take their
severall names. Three to a doore, one to be the boards,
one to be the hinges, and the third to be the threshold.
Foure to a childe, as protectors of his baudels, of his
drinke, of his meat, and of his sucking. Some are
certaine, others uncertaine, some doubtfull, and some
that come not yet into paradise.
Quos quoniam cash nondum dignamur honore,
Quas aedunus certe terras habitare sinamus.²
Whom for as yet with heav'n we have not graced,
Let them on earth by our good grant be placed.
There are some Philosophicall, some poeticall, and
some civill, some of a meane condition, betweene divine
and humane nature, mediators and spokes-men betweene
us and God : worshipped in a kinde of second
or diminutive order of adoration : infinite in titles and
offices: some good, some bad, some old and crazed,
and some mortall. For Chrysippus thought that in the
last conflagration or burning of the world, all the Gods
should have an end, except Jupiter. Man faineth a
thousand pleasant societies betweene God and him.
Nay, is he not his countrieman ?
1 OVID. Fast. 1. i. 294. ² OVID. Metam, 1. i. 194,