But let us consider the secret reasons which Virgil had for thus framing this noble episode, wherein the whole passion of love is more exactly described than in any other poet. Love was the theme of his fourth book; and though it is the shortest of the whole Æneis, yet there he has given its beginning, its progress, its traverses, and its conclusion; and had exhausted so entirely this subject, that he could resume it but very slightly in the eight ensuing books.

She was warmed with the graceful appearance of the hero; she smothered those sparkles out of decency, but conversation blew them up into a flame. Then she was forced to make a confident of her, whom she best might trust, her own sister, who approves the passion, and thereby augments it; then succeeds her publick owning it; and after that, the consummation. Of Venus and Juno, Jupiter and Mercury, I say nothing; for they were all machining work. But possession having cooled his love, as it increased her's, she soon perceived the change, or at least grew suspicious of a change: this suspicion soon turned to jealousy, and jealousy to rage; then she disdains and threatens, and again is humble, and entreats: and, nothing availing, despairs, curses, and at last becomes her own executioner. See here the whole process of that passion, to which nothing can be added. I dare go no farther, lest I should lose the connection of my discourse.

To love our native country, and to study its benefit and its glory; to be interessed in its con

cerns, is natural to all men, and is indeed our common duty. A poet makes a farther step for endeavouring to do honour to it. It is allowable in him even to be partial in its cause; for he is not tied to truth, or fettered by the laws of history. Homer and Tasso are justly praised for choosing their heroes out of Greece and Italy; Virgil, indeed, made his a Trojan, but it was to derive the Romans and his own Augustus from him: but all the three poets are manifestly partial to their heroes, in favour of their country. For Dares Phrygius reports of Hector, that he was slain cowardly; Æneas, according to the best account, slew not Mezenteus, but was slain by him; and the Chronicles of Italy tell us little of that Rinaldo d'Este, who conquers Jerusalem in Tasso. He might be a champion of the church; but we know not that he was so much as present at the siege. To apply this to Virgil; he thought himself engaged in honour to espouse the cause and quarrel of his country against Carthage. He knew he could not please the Romans better, or oblige them more to patronize his poem, than by disgracing the foundress of that city. He shews her ungrateful to the memory of her first husband; doting on a stranger; enjoyed, and afterwards forsaken by him. This was the original, says he, of the immortal hatred betwixt the two rival nations. It is true, he colours the falsehood of Æneas by an express command from Jupiter to forsake the queen, who had obliged him: but he

knew the Romans were to be his readers, and them he bribed, perhaps at the expence of his hero's honesty; but he gained his cause, however, as pleading before corrupt judges. They were content to see their founder false to love, for still he had the advantage of the amour. It was their enemy whom he forsook, and she might have forsaken him, if he had not got the start of her: she had already forgotten her vows to her Sichæus; and varium et mutabile semper femina, is the sharpest satire in the fewest words that ever was made on womankind; for both the adjectives are neuter, and animal must be understood, to make them grammar. Virgil does well to put those words into the mouth of Mercury: if a god had not spoken them, neither durst he have written them, nor I translated them. Yet the deity was forced to come twice on the same errand; and the second time, as much a hero as Æneas was, he frighted him. It seems, he feared not Jupiter so much as Dido. For your Lordship may observe, that as much intent as he was upon his voyage, yet he still delayed it, till the messenger was obliged to tell him plainly, that if he weighed not anchor in the night, the queen would be with him in the morning; notumque furens quid femina possit: she was injured, she was revengeful, 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.*

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This naturally leads me to the defence of the famous anachronism, in making Æneas and Dido contemporaries; for it is certain that the hero lived almost two hundred years before the building of Carthage. One who imitates Boccalini, says, that Virgil was accused before Apollo for this errour. 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 ;—

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Legatus est vir bonus, peregrè missus ad mentiendum reipublicæ causa;" a sentence which Sir Henry wrote in the Album of Christopher Flecamore, as he passed through Germany, when he went as Ambassador to Venice. These words, says his biographer, 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 that time signified to sojourn, as well as to utter criminal falshood,) 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.

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 a 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 Segrais 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 Æneid; 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 authentick 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; dictates a letter for her just before her death, to the ingrateful fugitive;