rticular a
manner, but because none of them seem to have had a proper right to a
place among the dead, as not having run out the whole thread of their
days, and finished the term of life that had been allotted them upon
earth. The first of these are the souls of infants, who are snatched
away by untimely ends: the second, are of those who are put to death
wrongfully, and by an unjust sentence; and the third, of those who grew
weary of their lives, and laid violent hands upon themselves. As for
the second of these, Virgil adds with great beauty, that Minos, the
judge of the dead, is employed in giving them a rehearing, and assigning
them their several quarters suitable to the parts they acted in life.
The poet, after having mentioned the souls of those unhappy men who
destroyed themselves, breaks out into a fine exclamation: "Oh, how
gladly," says he, "would they now endure life with all its miseries! But
the Destinies forbid their return to earth, and the waters of Styx
surround them with nine streams that are unpassable." It is very
remarkable, that Virgil, notwithstanding self-murder was so frequent
among the heathens, and had been practised by some of the greatest men
in the very age before him, has here represented it as so heinous a
crime. But in this particular he was guided by the doctrines of his
great master Plato, who says on this subject, that a man is placed in
his station of life like a soldier in his proper post, which he is not
to quit whatever may happen, until he is called off by his commander who
planted him in it.

There is another point in the platonic philosophy, which Virgil has made
the groundwork of the greatest part in the piece we are now examining,
having with wonderful art and beauty materialised, if I may so call it,
a scheme of abstracted notions, and clothed the most nice refined
conceptions of philosophy in sensible images and poetical
representations. The Platonists tell us, that the Soul, during her
residence in the body, contracts many virtuous and vicious habits, so as
to become a beneficent, mild, charitable, or an angry, malicious,
revengeful being: a substance inflamed with lust, avarice, and pride;
or, on the contrary, brightened with pure, generous, and humble
dispositions: that these and the like habits of virtue and vice growing
into the very essence of the Soul, survive and gather strength in her
after her dissolution: that the torments of a vicious soul in a future
state ari