ing, and unblameable.

"AEneas here beheld of _form divine,
A godlike youth in glittering armour shine_."

The phrase is even heightened; but it does not loiter, like that other, in
your memory. The very heightening has injured the image--the shadow that
shone brighter in simple words.

The shadow then thrown across--

"Sed _frons_ laeta parum"--

is well given, with a variation, by--

"But gloomy were his _eyes_."

The lightlessness is feelingly placed where the chief light should be.

The unequalled

"Ostendent terris hunc tantum Fata,"

so fully signifying the magnitude of the gift offered and withdrawn--so
sadly the brief promise, and all so concisely, meets with a soft and
bright rendering in

"The _blissful vision_ of a day."

But Dryden's "shown _on_ earth," less positively affirms the loss fallen
upon the earth, than the Latin "shall show to the nations."

The praise involving the recollection of the manners which were--

"Heu pietas! heu prisca fides! invictaque bello
Dextera!"

is given with admirable fervour.

"Mirror of ancient faith, in early youth
Undaunted worth! inviolable truth!"

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 th