and, this being allow'd, (as I am afraid it must,) he was oblig'd, antecedent to all other considerations, to search an asylum for his gods in Italy-for those very gods, I say, who had promis'd to his race the universal empire. Could a pious man dispense with the commands of Jupiter, to satisfy his passion, or (take it in the strongest sense) to comply with the obligations of his gratitude? Religion, 't is true, must have moral honesty for its groundwork, or we shall be apt to suspect its truth; but an immediate revelation dispenses with all duties of morality. All casuists agree that theft is a breach of the moral law; yet, if I might presume to mingle things sacred with profane, the Israelites only spoil'd the Egyptians, not robb'd them, because the propriety was transferr'd by a revelation to their lawgiver. I confess Dido was a very infidel in this point; for she would not believe, as Virgil makes her say, that ever Jupiter would send Mercury on such an immoral errand. But this needs no answer, at least no more than Virgil gives it:

Fata obstant; placidasque viri deus obstruit aures.

This notwithstanding, as Segrais confesses, he might have shewn a little more sensibility when he left her; for that had been according to his character.

But let Virgil answer for himself. He still lov'd her, and struggled with his inclinations to obey the gods:

Curam sub corde premebat,

Multa gemens, magnoque animum labefactus amore.

Upon the whole matter, and humanly speaking, I doubt there was a fault somewhere; and Jupiter is better able to bear the blame than either Virgil or Æneas. The poet, it seems, had found it out, and therefore brings the deserting hero and the forsaken lady to meet together in the lower regions, where he excuses himself when 't is too late; and accordingly she will take no satisfaction, nor so much as hear him. Now Segrais is forc'd to abandon his defense, and excuses his author by saying that the Æneis is an imperfect work, and that death prevented the divine poet from reviewing it; and for that reason he had condemn'd it to the fire; tho', at the same time, his two translators must acknowledge

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that the Sixth Book is the most correct of the whole Æneis. O, how convenient is a machine sometimes in a heroic poem! This of Mercury is plainly one; and Virgil was constrain'd to use it here, or the honesty of his hero would be ill defended. And the fair sex, however, if they had the deserter in their power, would certainly have shewn him no more mercy than the Bacchanals did Orpheus: for, if too much constancy may be a fault sometimes, then want of constancy, and ingratitude after the last favor, is a crime that never will be forgiven. But of machines, more in their proper place; where I shall shew with how much judgment they have been us'd by Virgil; and, in the mean time, pass to another article of his defense on the present subject; where, if I cannot clear the hero, I hope at least to bring off the poet; for here I must divide their causes. Let Æneas trust to his machine, which will only help to break his fall; but the address is incomparable. Plato, who borrow'd so much from Homer, and yet concluded for the banishment of all poets, would at least have rewarded Virgil before he sent him into exile. But I go farther, and say that he ought to be acquitted, and deserv'd, beside, the bounty of Augustus and the gratitude of the Roman people. If, after this, the ladies will stand out, let them remember that the jury is not all agreed; for Octavia was of his party, and was of the first quality in Rome; she was also present at the reading of the Sixth Æneid, and we know not that she condemn'd Æneas; but we are sure she presented the poet for his admirable elegy on her son Marcellus.

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 describ'd than in any other poet. Love was the theme of his Fourth Book: and, tho' it is the shortest of the whole neis, 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 warm'd with the graceful appearance of the hero; she smother'd those sparkles out of decency; but conversation blew them up into a flame. Then she was forc'd to make a confident of her whom she best might trust, her own

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sister, who approves the passion, and thereby augments it; then succeeds her public 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 cool'd his love, as it increas'd hers, she soon perceiv'd the change, or at least grew suspicious of a change; this suspicion soon turn'd to jealousy, and jealousy to rage; then she disdains and threatens, and again is humble, and intreats, 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 interested in its concerns, is natural to all men, and is indeed our common duty. A poet makes a farther step; for, endeavoring to do honor to it, 't is allowable in him even to be partial in its cause; for he is not tied to truth, or fetter'd by the laws of history. Homer and Tasso are justly prais'd 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 favor of their country; for Dares Phrygius reports of Hector that he was slain cowardly: Eneas, according to the best account, slew not Mezentius, 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 engag'd in honor 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; enjoy'd, and afterwards forsaken by him. This was the original, says he, of the immortal hatred betwixt the two rival nations. 'T is true, he colors the falsehood of Eneas by an express command from Jupiter, to forsake the queen who had oblig'd him; but he knew the Romans were to be his readers, and them he brib'd, perhaps at the expense of his hero's honesty;

but he gain'd 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 forc'd to come twice on the same errand; and the second time, as much a hero as Æneas was, he frighted him. It seems he fear'd not Jupiter so much as Dido; for your Lordship may observe that, as much intent as he was upon his voyage, yet he still delay'd it, till the messenger was oblig'd to tell him plainly, that, if he weigh'd not anchor in the night, the queen would be with him in the morning. Notumque furens quid femina possit-she was injur'd; she was revengeful; she was powerful. The poet had likewise before hinted that her people were naturally perfidious; for he gives their character in their 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 privileg'd to lie as an ambassador, for the honor and interests of his country; at least as Sir Henry Wotton has defin'd.

This naturally leads me to the defense of the famous anachronism, in making Æneas and Dido contemporaries; for 't is certain that the hero liv'd almost two hundred years before the building of Carthage. One who imitates Bocaline says that Virgil was accus'd 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 anything might be allow'd to his son Virgil, on the account of his other merits; that, being a monarch, he had a dispensing power, and pardon'd 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 thro' it with his weight. They who will imitate him wisely must choose, as he did, an obscure and a remote ara, 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 defense, and proves it from his learned friend Bochartus, whose letter on this subject he has printed at the end of the Fourth Eneid, 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 anything 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 ingrateful 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 forc'd 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 induc'd Virgil to coin this fable I have shew'd already; and have also begun to shew 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 call'd a fault in poetry, says Aristotle, but