as his crimes; that he could with his outstretched finger bore a hole through a sound apple (
integrum malum digito terebraret), and wound the head of a child or even a youth with a fillip, (
caput pueri, vel etiam adolescentis, talitro vulneraret.) His excesses must, however, have enervated his frame long before his death by suffocation.
13
His garb, writes Josephus, "was so resplendent as to spread a horror over those that looked intently upon Him."—Lib. xix. c. 8.
14
"An owl," says Josephus (xix. 8); "an angel of the Lord," αγγελος Κυριου, say the scriptures, (Acts. xii. 23,)—in either case a spectral illusion.
15
It is impossible for anyone devoted to the study of "Paradise Lost," of "Comus," even of "Sampson Agonistes," and especially of "Il Pensoroso" and "L'Allegro," to doubt that their writer was carried away at times by the œstrum, or divine afflatus, although Dr Johnson discredits "these bursts of light, and involutions of darkness, these transient and involuntary excursions and retrocessions of invention."—See Lives of the Poets, vol. i. p. 188.
