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 colors 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 expense 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 fœmina,' 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 on 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 fœmina 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 honor 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 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 error.

The god soon found that he was not able to defend his favorite 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 moralise 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 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 newcreated Dido; 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 shown 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 Segrais, to condemn Virgil for having made a fiction against the order of time, when we commend Ovid and other poets who made many of their fictions against the order of nature? For what are the splendid miracles of the Metamorphoses? Yet these are beautiful as they are related, and have also deep learning 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 honor 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 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 acknowlege that if he had deprived his Æneid of so great an ornament 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 honor of this episode, that it is not only now esteemed the most pleasing entertainment of the Æneid, 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 legitur pars ulla magis de corpore toto,

Quam non legitimo fœdere junctus amor.

where, 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 exstruis - he calls Eneas not only a fond husband, but upbraids him for being a fond husband, as the word ' uxorius' 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 I 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. Be 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 you ashore 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 dishonored 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.

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 acknowlege; 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 Segrais, 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