ound his enemy's neck
Locked in stiff rings his adamantine coil,
Until the eagle, faint with pain and toil,
Remitted his strong flight, and near the sea
Languidly fluttered, hopeless so to foil
His adversary, who then reared on high
His red and burning crest, radiant with victory.

"Then on the white edge of the bursting surge,
Where they had sunk together, would the snake
Relax his suffocating grasp, and scourge
The wind with his wild writhings; for, to break
That chain of torment, the vast bird would shake
The strength of his unconquerable wings
As in despair, and with his sinewy neck
Dissolve in sudden shock those linked rings,
Then soar--as swift as smoke from a volcano springs.

"Wile baffled wile, and strength encountered strength,
Thus long, but unprevailing--the event
Of that portentous fight appeared at length.
Until the lamp of day was almost spent
It had endured, when lifeless, stark, and rent,
Hung high that mighty serpent, and at last
Fell to the sea, while o'er the continent,
With clang of wings and scream, the eagle past,
Heavily borne away on the exhausted blast."

I have repudiated the adverse criticism on Cicero's poetry which has
been attributed to Juvenal; but, having done so, am bound in fairness
to state that which is to be found elsewhere in any later author of
renown as a classic. In the treatise De Oratoribus, attributed to
Tacitus, and generally published with his works by him--a treatise
commenced, probably, in the last year of Vespasian's reign, and
completed only in that of Domitian--Cicero as a poet is spoken of
with a severity of censure which the writer presumes to have been his
recognized desert. "For Caesar," he says, "and Brutus made verses, and
sent them to the public libraries; not better, indeed, than Cicero, but
with less of general misfortune, because only a few people knew that
they had done so." This must be taken for what it is worth. The treatise,
let it have been written by whom it might, is full of wit, and is
charming in language and feeling. It is a dialogue after the manner of
Cicero himself, and is the work of an author well conversant with the
subjects in hand. But it is, no doubt, the case that those two
unfortunate lines which have been quoted became notorious in Rome when
there was a party anxious to put