rival, "AEneas
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 AEneas 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 mothers--the INFURIATING of the
young, gallant, 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 the 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 petted--and, 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 Ili