latter temple is supposed, from a bas-relief found in it, representing the Sibyl sitting in the act of delivering an oracle, to be the ancient shrine of the Sibyl Albunea mentioned by Horace, Tibullus, and Lactantius.  The earliest bronze statues at Rome were those of the three Sibyls, placed near the Rostra, in the middle of the Forum.  No specimens of the literature of Rome precede the Sibylline books, except the rude hymn known as the Litany of the Arval Brothers, dating from the time of Romulus himself, which is simply an address to Mars, the Lares, and the Semones, praying for fair weather and for protection to the flocks.  And it is thus most interesting to notice that the two compositions which lay at the foundation of all the splendid Latin literature of later ages were of an eminently religious character.

One of the most remarkable things connected with the pagan Sibyls were the apocryphal Jewish and Christian prophecies to which they gave rise.  When the sacred oak of Dodona perished down to the ground, out of its roots sprang up a fresh growth of fictitious prophetic literature.  This literature emanated from different nationalities and different schools of thought.  It combined classical story and Scripture tradition.  Most of it was the product of pre-Christian Judaism, and seemed to have been composed in times of great national excitement.  The misery of the present, the prospect still more gloomy beyond, impelled its authors to anxious inquiries into the future.  The books were written, like the genuine Sibylline books, in the metrical form, which the old Greek tradition had consecrated to religious use; and their style so closely resembled that of the Apocalypse and the Old Testament prophecies, that some pagan writers who accepted them as genuine did not hesitate to say that the writers of the Bible had plagiarised parts of their prophecies from the oracles of the Sibyls.

Few fragments of the genuine Sibylline books remain to us, and these are to be found chiefly in the writings of Ovid and Virgil, whose “Golden Age” and well-known “Fourth Eclogue” were greatly indebted for their materials to them.  But we possess a large collection of the Judaeo-Christian oracles, which were probably gathered together by some unknown editor in the seventh century.  Originally there were fourteen books of unequal antiquity and value, but some of them have been lost.  Cardinal Angelo Mai discovered in the Ambrosian Library at Milan a manuscript which contained the eleventh book entire, besides a portion of the sixth and eighth books; and a few years later, among the secret stores of the Vatican Library, he found two other manuscripts which contained entire the last four books of the collection.  These were published in Rome in 1828.  The best edition of all the extant books is that which M. Alexandre issued in Paris, under the name of Oracula Sibyllina.  This editor exaggerates the extent of the Christian element in the Sibylline prophecies; but his dissertation