As for those three words that smote, as the tradition goes, the heart of the too deeply concerned auditress, the bereaved mother herself, to swooning

"Tu Marcellus eris!"— they are no doubt, in their overwhelming simplicity, untransferable to our uncouth idiom; and our ears may thank Dryden for the skill with which, by a "New Marcellus," and an otherwise explanatory paraphrase, he has kept the Virgilian music. Meantime the passionate vehemence of the breaking away from that prophecy of intolerable grief-the call for the bestrewment of flowers

"Manibus date lilia plenis," &c.— must be weakened, if the moment of the transition is to fall, as we see it in Dryden, at the interval between verse and verse, and not, as we have just seen it with Virgil, at the juncture within the verse of hemistich with hemistich.

"Tu Marcellus eris.-Manibus date lilia plenis," &c.

There is a pause in that line, during which the mother, had she not swooned, might have calmed her heart!

It is usual to discover that Virgil wants originality-that he transcribes his battles from Homer. In truth, it was not easy, with fights of the Homeric ages, to do otherwise. However, Virgil has done otherwise, if any one will be at the pains to look.

For instance, an incident, not in the battles by the Xanthus, is the following:

A powerful Tuscan warrior, infuriated by the ill fighting of his men, distinguishes himself by an extraordinary feat. Clasping round the body, and so unhorsing a lighter antagonist, he rides off with him; snaps the javelin, which his captive still grasps, near the head, and with its point probes and aims for a vulnerable place. The unfortunate Latine, as he lies across the horse's neck, struggles, and will baffle the deathly blow. Landseer could suggest no more vivid comparison, than one which leaps into your own imagination--a snake soused upon by an eagle.

"So stoops the yellow eagle from on high,

And bears a speckled serpent through the sky,

A glorious paraphrase!

This is an incident more like a knight of Ariosto's, the terrible Sarazin Rhodomont, or Orlando himself, than Homer's, who did not, indeed, combat on horseback.

But speaking of the moderns, we will venture to say, that if Virgil has copied, he is also an original who has been copied. And we will ask, who is the prototype of the ladies, turned knights, who flourish in favour with our poets of romance ?-with Ariosto, with Tasso, with our own Spenser ? Who but the heroic virgin ally of the Rutulian prince-who but CAMILLA?

We name her, however, neither for her own sake, nor for Virgil's, but for Dryden's, who seems also to have taken her into favour, and to have written, with a peculiar spirit and feeling, the parts of the poem which represent her in action.

She leads her Amazons into Italian fields, warring against the fate-driven fugitives of overthrown Troy. Whence were her Amazon followers? Whence is She? Her history her divine patroness, Diana, relates. Her father, the strong-limbed, rude-souled Metabus, a wild and intractable Volscian king, fled from the face and from the pursuit of his people. He bore, in his arms, one dear treasure; a companion of his flight; yet an infant-this daughter. He flies. The Amasenus, in flood, bars his way. More doubtful for his charge than for himself, hastily, with love-prompted art, he swathes the babe in stripped bark-binds her to the shaft of his huge oaken spear-dedicates her with a prayer to the virgin god

enquiry which you have no means of satisfying. You must hold Camilla to be as much Virgil's as any thing is Homer's in the Iliad. The painting throughout is to the life, and perfectly graceful. The subject was one likely to attach the imagination of a modern poet, and you feel all along, that pleasure inspirits the happy translation of Dryden.

The Destruction of Troy, the Love of Dido, the Descent into Hell, entire Cantos of the poem, take deep and lasting possession of every reader; and, like the first and second books of the Paradise Lost, too much seduce admiration from the remainder of the work. You pick out from the whole Italian war, Lausus, Pallas, Nisus, and Euryalus, and think that you have done with Virgil.

We beg to propose a literary experiment. Homer has left us two poems-a War, and a Wandering. Virgil has bequeathed us one, representing those two, and that proportionally; although in the Latin the Odyssey comes first, and the Iliad follows. For the first six Eneids relate the wandering; whilst the latter six display the war.

Let us,

therefore, fairly cut the great outrolling, unfolding picture in two, and have two poems, distinct, although closely allied; twins, moulded in one womb, nourished from the same blood. We dare to predict that the poem of "Eneas in Italy," now considered with its own independent interests, and after its own art and management, will duly compete with its rival, "Eneas Fugitive."

How the whole movement, and march, and original conduct of the Italian war will come out! The peaceful entertainment of the Trojans by Latinus, moved with old and new prophecies, and his ready offer of his daughter, Lavinia, to Æneas in marriage the adverse interposition of Juno-her summoning of Alecto from hell-the glad Fury's fine discharge of her part-her maddening of the Queen Amata, who loves Turnus, hates the strangers, and catches in her own madness all the Latian mothersthe INFURIATING of the young, gal

lant, ardent, defrauded, princely lover himself—a splendid scene, where the hot warrior's jeers of the fiend in her beldam disguise, sting her Tartarean heart as if it had been a woman's, and for very wrath she reveals her terrible self-then that exquisite incident, won from the new matter of the poet, from the PASTORAL manners with which he is historically obliged to deal in Italy-the Fury's third and last feat her drawing-on of Ascanius's hounds to hunt the beautiful favourite stag, which the daughter of the King's chief herdsman pettedand, thence, a quarrel, a skirmish, slaughter begun, and the whole population of the plains aroused. And so with bacchanal women, with Rutulians, and with his own rude liegemen in tumult, the old King overborne-shutting himself up in his palace; and war inflamed in Hesperia, to the full heart's-wish of Jove's imperial wife, who has nothing left her to do more than, descending again from the sky, to push open with her own hands the brazen-gated temple of Janus.

All this is very poetical-is very different from the Iliad, and is perfectly measured to the scale of a war, moved, not by confederated Greece for the overthrow of an Asiatic empire, but by the tribes of the coast for beating back the crews of a few straggling ships from planting a colony, who have nothing on their side but their valour, their fame, and their fates.

Analyze this war; make out for yourself, distinctly, the story, of which in a poem one always too easily loses the sequence, delight and emotion making one less observant; then understand the poetical workings out, in their places and after their bearings; and you will satisfy yourself, that although the cleaving of heads, and the transpiercing of trunks, and the hewing off of limbs, are processes that must always keep up a certain general resemblance to themselves, you have not a campaign imitated from the Iliad; but an original one--proper to person and place.