vengeful; she was powerful. The poet had likewise before hinted, that the people were naturally perfidious; for he gives their character in the queen, and makes a proverb of Punica fides, many ages before it was invented.

Thus, I hope, my lord, that I have made good my promise, and justified the poet, whatever becomes of the false knight. And sure a poet is as much privileged to lie as an ambassador, for the honour and interest of his country: at least as Sir Henry Wotton has defined.*

This naturally leads me to the defence of the famous anachronism, in making Eneas and Dido contemporaries; for it is certain, that the hero lived almost two hundred years before the builling of Carthage. One who imitates Boccalini, says, that Virgil was accused before Apollo for this error. The god soon found, that he was not able to defend his favourite by reason; for the case was clear: he therefore gave this middle sentence, that any thing might be allowed to his son Virgil, on the account of his other merits; that, being a monarch, he had a dispensing power, and pardoned him. But, that this special act of grace might never be drawn into example, or pleaded by his puny successors in justification of their ignorance, he decreed for the future, no poet should presume to make a lady die for love two hundred years before her birth. To moralize this story, Virgil is the Apollo who has this dispensing power. His great judgment made the laws of poetry; but he never made himself a slave to them; chronology, at best, is but a cobweb-law, and he broke through it with his weight. They who will imitate him wisely, must choose, as he did, an obscure and remote era, where they may invent at pleasure, and not be easily contradicted. Neither he, nor the Romans, had ever read the Bible, by which only his false computation of times can be made out against him. This Ségrais says in his defence, and proves it from his learned friend Bochartus, whose letter on this subject he has printed at the end of the Fourth Encid, to which I refer your lordship and the reader. Yet the credit of Virgil was so great, that he made this fable of his own invention pass for an authentic history, or at least as credible as any thing in Homer. Ovid takes it up after him, even in the same age, and makes an ancient heroine of Virgil's new-created Dido;

* "Legatus est vir bonis, peregre missus ad mentindum reipublicæ causa," a sentence which Sir Henry wrote in the Album of Christopher Fleca more, as he passed through Germany, when he went as ambassador to Venice. These words, says his blographer, Isaac Walton, "he could have been content should have been thus Englished: An ambassador is an honest man, sent to lie abroad for the good of his country: but the word mentiendum not admitting of a double meaning, like lie, (which at

dictates a letter for her, just before her death, to the ungrateful fugitive; and, very unluckily for himself, is for measuring a sword with a man so much superior in force to him, on the same subject. I think I may be judge of this, because I have translated both. The famous author of the "Art of Love" has nothing of his own; he borrows all from a greater master in his own profession; and, which is worse, improves nothing which he finds. Nature fails him; and, being forced to his old shift, he has recourse to witticism. This passes indeed with his soft admirers, and gives him the preference to Virgil in their esteem. But let them like for themselves, and not prescribe to others; for our author needs not their admiration.

The motives that induced Virgil to coin this fable, I have showed already; and have also begun to show, that he might make this anachronism, by superseding the mechanic rules of poetry, for the same reason that a monarch may dispense with or suspend his own laws, when he finds it necessary so to do, especially if those laws are not altogether fundamental. Nothing is to be called a fault in poetry, says Aristotle, but what is against the art: therefore a man may be an admirable poet, without being an exact chronologer. Shall we dare, continues Ségrais, to condemn Virgil for having made a fiction against the order of time, when we commend Ovid and other poets, who have made many of their fictions against the order of nature? For what else are the splendid miracles of the metamorphoses? Yet these are beautiful as they are related, and have also deep learn. ing and instructive mythologies couched under them but to give, as Virgil does in this episode, the original cause of the long wars betwixt Rome and Carthage, to draw truth out of fiction after so probable a manner, with so much beauty, and so much for the honour of his country, was proper only to the divine wit of Maro; and Tasso, in one of his discourses, admires him for this particularly. It is not lawful, indeed, to contradict a point of history which is known to all the world, as, for example, to make Hannibal and Scipio contemporaries with Alexander; but, in the dark recesses of antiquity, a great poet may and ought to feign such things as he finds not there, if they can be brought to embellish that subject which he treats. On the other side, the pains and diligence of ill poets is but that time signified to sojourn, as well as to utter criminal falsehood,) this pleasantry brought my lord ambassador into some trouble; Jasper Scioppius,a Romanist, about eight years afterwards, asserting in one of his works, that this was an acknowledged principle of the religion professed by King James, and those whom he employed as his representatives in foreign countries." See the life of Sir Henry Wotton, p. 38. edit. 1670.—Malone, p.486. Note

thrown away, when they want the genius to invent and feign agreeably. But, if the fictions be delightful, (which they always are, if they be natural;) if they be of a piece; if the beginning, the middle, and the end, be in their due places, and artfully united to each other, such works can never fail of their deserved success. And such is Virgil's episode of Dido and Æneas, where the sourest critic must acknowledge, that if he had deprived his Æneïs of so great an or nament because he found no traces of it in antiquity, he had avoided their unjust censure, but had wanted one of the greatest beauties of his poem. I shall say more of this in the next article of their charge against him, which is want of invention. In the mean time, I may affirm, in honour of this episode, that it is not only now esteemed the most pleasing entertainment of the Eneis, but was so accounted in his own age, and before it was mellowed into that reputation which time has given it; for which I need produce no other testimony, than that of Ovid, his contemporary

Nec pars ulla magis legitur de corpore toto, Quam non legitimo fædere junctus amorwhere, by the way, you may observe, my lord, that Ovid, in those words, Non legitimo fœdere junctus amor, will by no means allow it to be a lawful marriage betwixt Dido and Æneas. He was in banishment when he wrote those verses, which I cite from his letter to Augustus: "You, sir," saith he, "have sent me into exile for writing my Art of Love,' and my wanton Elegies; yet your own poet was happy in your good graces, though he brought Dido and Æneas into a cave, and left them there not over-honestly together. May I be so bold to ask your majesty, is it a greater fault to teach the art of unlawful love, than to show it in the action?" But was Ovid, the court-poet, so bad a courtier, as to find no other plea to excuse himself, than by a plain accusation of his master? Virgil confessed it was a lawful marriage betwixt the lovers, that Juno the goddess of matrimony had ratified it by her presence; for it was her business to bring matters to that issue. That the ceremonies were short, we may believe: for Dido was not only amorous, but a widow. Mercury himself, though employed on a quite contrary errand, yet owns it a marriage by an inuendo pulchramque uxorius urbem extruis. He calls Eneas not only a husband, but up braids him for being a fond husband, as the word uzorius implies. Now mark a little, if your lordship pleases, why Virgil is so much concerned to make this marriage, (for he seems to be the father of the bride himself, and to give her to the bridegroom;) it was to make way for the divorce which he intended afterwards;

for he was a finer flatterer than Ovid, and 1 more than conjecture, that he had in his eye the divorce which not long before had passed betwixt the emperor and Scribonia.* He drew this dimple in the cheek of Æneas, to prove Augustus of the same family, by so remarkable a feature in the same place. Thus, as we say in our home-spun English proverb, he killed two birds with one stone; pleased the emperor, by giving him the resemblance of his ancestor, and gave him such a resemblance as was not scandalous in that age. For, to leave one wife, and take another, was but a matter of gallantry at that time of day among the Romans. Neque hæc in fœdera veni, is the very excuse which Æneas makes, when he leaves his lady: "I made no such bargain with you at our marriage, to live always drudging on at Carthage: my business was Italy; and I never made a secret of it. If I took my pleasure, had not you your share of it? I leave you free, at my departure, to comfort yourself with the next stranger who happens to be shipwrecked on your coast. as kind a hostess as you have been to me; and you can never fail of another husband. In the mean time, I call the gods to witness, that I leave your shore unwillingly; for, though Juno made the marriage, yet Jupiter commands me to forsake you." This is the effect of what he saith, when it is dishonoured out of Latin verse. into English prose. If the poet argued not aright, we must pardon him for a poor blind heathen, who knew no better morals.

Be

I have detained your lordship longer than I intended, on this objection, which would indeed weigh something in a spiritual court; but I am not to defend our poet there. The next, I think, is but a cavil, though the cry is great against him, and hath continued from the time of Macrobius to this present age. I hinted it before. They lay no less than want of invention to his charge-a capital crime, I must acknowledge; for a poet is a maker,† as the word signifies; and he who cannot make, that is, invent, hath his name for nothing. That which makes this accusation look so strange at the first sight, is, that he has borrowed so many things from Homer, Apollonius Rhodius, and others who preceded him. But, in the first place, if invention is to be taken in so strict a sense, that the matter of a poem must be wholly new, and that in all its parts, then Scaliger hath made out, saith

The Emperor Augustus divorced Scribonia, his second wife, in order to make room for his marriage with Livia. But the argument of our author from the Eneid seems far-fetched.

This original and expressive word for a poet was long retained in Scotland.-See Dunbar's La

ment for the Death of the Makyrs.

Mr. Malone reads-so strong but strange here seems to signify alarming, or startling.

Bégrais, that the history of Troy was no more the invention of Homer than of Virgil. There was not an old woman, or almost a child, but had it in their mouths, before the Greek poet or his friends digested it into this admirable order in which we read it. At this rate, as Solomon hath told us, there is nothing new beneath the sun. Who then can pass for an inventor, if Homer, as well as Virgil, must be deprived of that glory? Is Versailles the less a new building, because the architect of that palace hath mitated others which were built before it? Walls, doors, and windows, apartments, offices, rooms of convenience and magnificence, are in all great houses. So descriptions, figures, fables, and the rest, must be in all heroic poems: they are the common materials of poetry, furnished from the magazine of nature; every poet hath as much right to them, as every man hath to air and water.

Quid prohibetis aquas? Usus communis aquarum

est.

But the argument of the work, that is to say, its principal action, the economy and disposition of it; these are the things which distinguish copies from originals. The poet, who borrows nothing from others, is yet to be born; he and the Jews' Messias will come together. There are parts of the Enels which resemble some parts both of the Ilias and of the Odysses; as, for example, Eneas descended into hell, and Ulysses had been there before him; Eneas loved Dido, and Ulysses loved Calypso; in few words, Virgil hath imitated Homer's Odysses in his first six books, and, in his last six, the Ilias. But from hence can we infer, that the two poets write the same history? Is there no invention in some other parts of Virgil's Eneis? The disposition of so many various matters, is not that his own? From what book of Homer had Virgil his episode of Nisus and Euryalus, of Mezentius and Lausus? From whence did he borrow his design of bringing Eneas into Italy? of establishing the Roman empire on the foundations of a Trojan colony? to say nothing of the honour he did his patron, not only in his descent from Venus, but in making him so like her in his best features, that the goddess might have mistaken Augustus for her son. He had indeed the story from common fame, as Homer had his from the Egyptian priestess. Æneadûm genetriz was no more unknown to Lucretius than to him. But Lucretius taught him not to form his hero, to give him piety or valour for his manners, and both in so eminent a degree, that, having done what was possible for man to save his king and country, his mother was forced to appear to him,

The

and restrain his fury, which hurried him to death in their revenge. But the poet made his piety more successful; he brought off his father and his son; and his gods witnessed to his devotion, by putting themselves under his protection, to be replaced by him in their promised Italy. Neither the invention nor the conduct of this great action were owing to Homer, or any other poet. It is one thing to copy, and another thing to imitate from nature. copier is that servile imitator, to whom Horace gives no better name than that of animal; he will not so much as allow him to be a man. Raphael imitated nature; they who copy one of Raphael's pieces, imitate but him; for his work is their original. They translate him as I do Virgil; and fall as short of him as I of Virgil. There is a kind of invention in the imitation of Raphael; for, though the thing was in nature, yet the idea of it was his own. Ulysses travelled; so did Eneas: but neither of them were the first travellers; for Cain went into the land of Nod before they were born; and neither of the poets ever heard of such a man. If Ulysses had been killed at Troy, yet Æneas must have gone to sea, or he could never have arrived in Italy. But the designs of the two poets were as different as the courses of their heroes; one went home, and the other sought a home. To return to my first similitude: suppose Apelles and Raphael had each of them painted a burning Troy, might not the modern painter have succeeded as well as the ancient, though neither of them had seen the town on fire? for the draughts of both were taken from the ideas which they had of nature. Cities had been burned, before either of them were in being. But, to close the simile as I began it; they would not have designed it after the same manner: Apelles would have distinguished Pyrrhus from the rest of all the Grecians, and showed him forcing his entrance into Priam's palace; there he had set him in the fairest light, and given him the chief place of all his figures; because he was a Grecian, and he would do honour to his country. Raphael, who was an Italian, and descended from the Trojans, would have made Æneas the hero of his piece; and perhaps not with his father on his back, his son in one hand, his bundle of gods in the other, and his wife following; for an act of piety is not half so graceful in a picture, as an act of courage: he would rather have drawn him killing Androgeos, or some other, hand to hand; and the blaze of the fires should have darted full upon his face, to make him conspicuous amongst his Trojans. This, I think, is a just comparison betwixt the two poets, in the

conduct of their several designs. Virgil cannot be said to copy Homer; the Grecian had only the advantage of writing first. If it be urged, that I have granted a resemblance in some Darts, yet therein Virgil has excelled him. For what are the tears of Calypso for being left, to the fury and death of Dido? Where is there the whole process of her passion, and all its violent effects to be found, in the languishing episode of the Odysses? If this be to copy, let the critics show us the same dispositions, features, or colouring, in their original. The like may be said of the descent to hell, which was not of Homer's invention neither; he had it from the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. But to what end did Ulysses make that journey? Eneas undertook it by the express commandment of his father's ghost; there he was to show him all the succeeding heroes of his race, and, next to Romulus, (mark if you please, the ad dress of Virgil,) his own patron, Augustus Casar. Anchises was likewise to instruct him how to manage the Italian war, and how to conclude it with his honour; that is, in other words, to lay the foundations of that empire which Augustus was to govern.

This

is the noble invention of our author; but it hath been copied by so many sign-post daubers, that now it has grown fulsome, rather by their want of skill, than by the commonness.

In the last place, I may safely grant, that, by reading Homer, Virgil was taught to imitate his invention that is, to imitate like him; which is no more than if a painter studied Raphael, that he might learn to design after his manner. And thus I might imitate Virgil, if I were capable of writing a heroic poem, and yet the invention be my own: but I should endeavour to avoid a servile copying. I would not give the same story under other names, with the same characters, in the same order, and with the same sequel; for every common reader to find me out at the first sight for a plagiary, and cry, This read before in Virgil, in a better language, and in better verse. This is like Merry Andrew on the low rope, copying lubberly the same tricks which his master is so dexterously performing on the high.

I will trouble your lordship but with one objection more, which I know not whether I found in Le Fevre, or Valais; but I am sure I have read it in another French critic, whom I will not name, because I think it is not much for his reputation.* Virgil, in the heat of actionsuppose, for example, in describing the fury of nis hero in a battle, when he is endeavouring 10 raise our concernments to the highest pitch

• Dacier.

-turns short on the sudden into some similitude, which diverts, sav they, your attention from the main subject, and mis-spends it on some trivial image. He pours cold water into the caldron, when his business is to make it boil.f

This accusation is general against all who would be thought heroic poets; but I think it touches Virgil less than any. He is too great a master of his art, to make a blot which may so easily be hit. Similitudes, as I have said, are not for tragedy, which is all violent, and where the passions are in a perpetual ferment; for there they deaden where they should animate; they are not of the nature of dialogue, unless in comedy: a metaphor is almost all the stage can suffer, which is a kind of similitude comprehended in a word. But this figure has a contrary effect in heroic poetry; there it is employed to raise the admiration, which is its proper business; and admiration is not of so violent a nature as fear or hope, compassion or horror, or any concernment we can have for such or such a person on the stage. Not but I confess, that similitudes and descriptions, when drawn into an unreasonable length, must needs nauseate the reader. Once, I remember, and but once, Virgil makes a similitude of fourteen lines; and his description of Fame is about the same number. He is blamed for both; and I doubt not but he would have contracted them, had he lived to have reviewed his work; but faults are no precedents. This I have observed of his similitudes in general, that they are not placed, as our unobserving critics tell us, in the heat of any action, but commonly in its declining. When he has warmed us in his description as much as possibly he can, then, lest that warmth should languish, he renews it by some apt similitude, which illustrates his subject, and yet palls not his audience. I need give your lordship but one example of this kind, and leave the rest to your observation, when next you review the whole Eneis in the original unblemished by my rude translation. It is in the first book, where the poet describes Neptune composing the ocean, on which Eolus had raised a tempest without his permission. He had already chidden the rebellious winds for obeying the commands of their usurping master; he had warned them from the seas; he had beaten down the billows with his mace, dispelled the clouds, restored the sunshine, while Triton and Cymothoë were heaving the ships

I fear there is something in this objection. Vir gil, who lived in a peaceful court, does not draw who, if he was not himself a warrior, was the poet his battles with the animation and reality of Homer,

of a rude and warlike age.

Ac, veluti magno in populo cum sæpe coörta est
Seditio, sævitque animis ignobile vulgus,
Jamque faces et saxa volant; furor arma ministrat;
Tum, pietate gravem ac meritis si forte virum quem
Conspexere, silent, arrectisque auribus adstant;
Ille regit dictis animos, et pectora mulcet :
Sic cunctus pelagi cecidit fragor, æquora postquam
Prospiciens genitor, cæloque invectus aperto,
Flectit equos, currà que volans dat lora secundo.

This is the first similitude which Virgil makes in this poem, and one of the longest in the whole; for which reason I the rather cite it. While the storm was in its fury, any allusion had been improper; for the poet could have compared it to nothing more impetuous than itself; consequently he could have made no illustration, If he could have illustrated, it had been an ambitious ornament out of season, and would have diverted our concernment: nunc non erct his locus; and therefore he deferred it to its proper place.*

These are the criticisms, of most_moment

which have been made against the Æneis by the ancients or moderns. As for the particular exceptions against this or that passage, Macrobius and Pontanus have answered them already. If I desired to appear more learned than I am, it had been as easy for me to have taken their obJections and solutions, as it is for a country parson to take the expositions of the fathers out of Junius and Tremellius, and not to have named the authors from whence I had them; for so

Ruæus, otherwise a most judicious commentator on Virgil's works, has used Pontanus, his greatest benefactor; of whom he is very silent; and I do not remember that he once cites him.

What follows next, is no objection; for that implies a fault; and it had been none in Virgil, if he had extended the time of his action beyond a year. At least Aristotle has set no precise limits to it. Homer's, we know, was within two months: Tasso, I am sure, exceeds not a summer; and, if I examined him, perhaps he might be reduced into a much less compass. Bossu leaves it doubtful whether Virgil's action were within the year, or took up some months beyond it. Indeed, the whole dis pute is of no more concernment to the common reader, than it is to a ploughman, whether February this year had 28 or 29 days in it. But,

⚫ Unquestionably the description, in the passage quoted, and the simile, aid each other with great

mutual effect.

↑ Commentators on the Scripture, mentioned by our author in the "Religio Laici," where, speaking of Dickenson's translation of Pere Simon's "Criti cal History of the Old Testament," he calls it A treasure, which, if country curates buy They Junius and Tremellius may defy.

which number I am sure your lordship is one,) I will translate what I think convenient out of Ségrais, whom perhaps you have not read; for he has made it highly probable, that the action of the Eneïs began in the spring, and was not extended beyond the autumn And we have known campaigns that have begun sooner, and have ended later.

Ronsard, and the rest whom Ségrais names, who are of opinion, that the action of this poem takes up almost a year and half, ground their calculation thus. Anchises died in Sicily at the end of winter, or beginning of the spring. Eneas, immediately after the interment of his father, puts to sea for Italy. He is surprised by the tempest described in the beginning of the first book; and there it is that the scene of the poem opens, and where the action must commence. He is driven by this storm on the coasts of Afric; he stays at Carthage all that summer, and almost all the winter following, sets sail again for Italy just before the beginning of the spring, meets with contrary winds, and makes Sicily the second time. This part of the action completes the year. Then he celebrates the anniversary of his father's funeral and shortly after arrives at Cuma; and from thence his time is taken up in his first treaty with Latinus, the overture of the war, the siege of his camp by Turnus, his going for succours to relieve it, his return, the raising of the siege by the first battle, the twelve days' truce, the second battle, the assault of Laurentum, and the single fight with Turnus; all which, they say, cannot take up less than four or five months more; by which account, we cannot suppose the entire action to be contained in a much less compass than a year and half.

Ségrais reckons another way; and his computation is not condemned by the learned Ruæus, who compiled and published the commentaries on our poet, which we call the Dauphin's Virgil.

He allows the time of the year when Anchises died to be in the latter end of winter, or the beginning of the spring: he acknowledges, that, when Eneas is first seen at sea afterwards, and is driven by the tempest on the coast of Afric, is the time when the action is Eneas left Carthage in the latter end of winnaturally to begin he confesses, further, that ter; for Dido tells him in express terms, as an argument for his longer stay,

Quinetiam hiberno moliris sidere classem. But, whereas Ronsard's followers suppose, that, when Æneas had buried his father, he set sail immediately for Italy, (though the tempest