8 dressing to Pollio, his great patron, and himself no tulgar poet, he no longer could restrain the freedom of his spirit, but began to assert his native character, which is sublimity; putting himself under the conduct of the same Cumæan Sybil, whom afterwards he gave for a guide to his Æneas. It is true he was sensible of his own boldness; and we know it by the paulo majora, which begins his 8 There are good grounds for believing that the fourth Eclogue of Virgil, (which should be the seventh,) though inscribed to Pollio, was not written in honour of his son, (C. Asinius Gallus) but either to celebrate the birth of young Marcellus, nephew to Octavius, in the year of Rome, 714, or on the prospect that the offspring with which Seribonia, who had been married to Octavius in the early part of that year, was pregnant, would prove a son, and so perpetuate in his family the power which he then began to assume. In the beginning of the following year, she was delivered of a child, which however, disappointed the poet's hopes, proving a daughter, the infamous Julia. The former of these notions, which the Jesuit, Catrou, produced as his own, was originally suggested by Badius Ascensius. The latter opinion (suggested by Boulacre in Bibliotheque Francoise, tom. 28, p. 243,) appears to me much more probable; for the child of which Octavia was then pregnant, being not by Antony, but by her former husband, Virgil had no particular inducement to make that circumstance the subject of his verse; or at least had not so strong an inducement as the pregnancy of the new-married wife of his patron and benefactor afforded; neither had he at this time any reason to prognosticate such great things of young Marcellus, (supposing him to have been the child of which Octavia was then pregnant,) however highly he might afterwards speak of him. Fourth Eclogue. He remembered, like young Manlius," that he was forbidden to engage; but what avails an express command to a youthful courage, which presages victory in the attempt ? Encouraged with success, he proceeds farther in the Sixth, and invades the province of philosophy. And notwithstanding that Phoebus had forewarned him of singing wars, as he there confesses, yet he presuned that the search of nature was as free to him, as to Lucretius, who at his age explained it according to the principles of Epicurus. In his Eighth Eclogue he has innovated nothing; the former part of it being the complaint and despair of a forsaken lover; the latter, a charm of an enchantress, to renew a lost affection. But the complaint perhaps contains some topicks which are above the condition of his persons; and our author seems to have made his herdsmen somewhat too learned for their profession: the charms are also of the same nature; but both were copied from Theocritus, and had received the applause of former ages in their original. There is a kind of rusticity in all those pompous verses; somewhat of a holiday shepherd strutting in his country buskins. The like may be observed both in the PoLLIO and the SILENUS; where the similitudes are drawn from the woods and mea • Who was cruelly beheaded by his father, T. Manlius Torquatus, for fighting with the General of the Latins, contrary to his order, though successfully, A. U. C, 414. Vid. Liv. lib. iv. c. 29; AUL. GEL. ix. 13. dows. They seem to me to represent our poet betwixt a farmer and a courtier, when he left Mantua for Rome, and dressed himself in his best habit to appear before his patron; somewhat too fine for the place from whence he came, and yet retaining part of its simplicity. In the Ninth Pastoral he collects some beautiful passages which were scattered in Theocritus, which he could not insert into any of his former Eclogues, and yet was unwilling they should be lost. In all the rest he is equal to his Sicilian master, and observes, like him, a just decorum, both of the subject, and the persons. As particularly in the Third Pastoral; where one of his shepherds describes a bowl, or mazer, curiously carved : In medio duo signa; Conon,et quis fuit alter, He remembers only the name of Conon, and for- After all, I must confess that the boorish dialect of Theocritus has a secret charm in it, which the Roman language cannot imitate, though Virgil has drawn it down as low as possibly he could; as in the cujum pecus, and some other words, for which he was so unjustly blamed by the bad criticks of his age, who could not see the beauties of that merum rus, which the poet described in those expressions. But Theocritus may justly be preferred as the original, without injury to Virgil, who modestly contents himself with the second place, and glories only in being the first who transplanted pastoral into his own country; and brought it there to bear as happily, as the cherry-trees which Lucullus brought from Pontus. Our own nation has produced a third poet in this kind, not inferior to the two former. For the SHEPHERD'S CALENDAR of Spencer is not to be matched in any modern language: not even by Tasso's AMINTA, which infinitely transcends Guarini's PASTOR-FIDO, as having more of nature in it, and being almost wholly clear from the wretched affectation of learning.' I will say nothing of the PISCATORY ECLOGUES,* because no • See p. 45, n. 9. By Sannazarius, and N. Parthenius Giannettasius. The PISCATORIA of the latter, together with his Nautica in eight books, were published in 8vo. at Naples, in 1685; but I doubt whether our author had seen them. Sannazarius was the inventor of this species of Eclogue. "Postremo (says the Jesuit Parthenius, in the preface to his PISCATORIA,) etsi sciam esse nonnullos, qui inter Eclogas non censent Piscatoria, tamen apud me plus valet ACTII nostri auctoritas, qui primus eâ laudo piscatores introduxit in Eclogas, ut post Virgilium nemo sit, qui illi præponendus videatur." The Eclogues of Sannazarius, together with some pieces of Fracastorius and other Italians who have written Latin poetry, were published, with an elegant preface, by Bishop Atterbury, (then a student of Christ Church,) in 8vo. in 1684. modern Latin can bear criticism. It is no wonder that rolling down through so many barbarous ages, from the spring of Virgil, it bears along with it the filth and ordures of the Goths and Vandals. Neither will I mention Monsieur Fontenelle, the living glory of the French. It is enough for him to have excelled his master, Lucian, without attempting to compare our miserable age with that of Virgil or Theocritus. Let me only add, for his reputation, si Pergama dextrâ Defendi possent, etiam hâc defensa fuissent. But Spencer being master of our northern dialect, and skilled in Chaucer's English, has so exactly imitated the Dorick of Theocritus, that his love is a perfect image of that passion which GOD infused into both sexes, before it was corrupted with the knowledge of arts, and the ceremonies of what we call good manners. My Lord, I know to whom I dedicate; and could not have been induced by any motive to put this part of Virgil, or any other, into unlearned hands. You have read him with pleasure, and I dare say, with admiration, in the Latin, of which you are a master. You have added to your natural endowments, which without flattery are eminent, the superstructures of study, and the knowledge of good authors. Courage, probity, and humanity are inherent in you. These virtues have ever been habitual to the ancient house of Cumberland, from |