disdains their love, to share with me
The sylvan shades, and vow'd virginity.
And oh! I wish, contented with my cares
Of savage spoils, she had not sought the wars.
Then had she been of my celestial train,
And shunn'd the fate that dooms her to be slain.
But since, opposing heaven's decree, she goes
To find her death among forbidden foes,
Haste with these arms, and take thy steepy flight,
Where, with the gods adverse, the Latins fight.
This bow to thee, this quiver, I bequeath,
This chosen arrow, to avenge her death:
By whate'er hand Camilla shall be slain,
Or of the Trojan or Italian train,
Let him not pass unpunish'd from the plain.
Then, in a hollow cloud, myself will aid
To bear the breathless body of my maid:
Unspoil'd shall be her arms, and unprofaned
Her holy limbs with any human hand,
And in a marble tomb laid in her native land."

What is Virgil's in this fair and romantically cast fiction? What hints
did the traditionary fable give him? You are not concerned to make an
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 AEneids 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 "AEneas
in Italy," now considered with its own independent interests, and after
its own art and management, will duly compete with its