burst into all the violence of rage, of contempt, and of
despair. This gradation has often been remarked as a principal beauty.
As some excuse for the coldness of AEneas which takes away so much of the
interest of the poem, Virgil is careful to recoil continually to our
attention, that he is acting under the impulse of the divinity. Such has
been the constant practice of the ancients to prevent our disgust, for
the action which they represent. In Orestes and Phoedra it is the excuse
of the violence of passion, in AEneas of that coldness which we find it
so difficult to forgive, but which in this point of view we shall be
inclined to pity.

While these sheets were in the press MONSIEUR DELILLE has given the
world another proof of the powers of his mind, and displayed the French
language to vast advantage, in a more arduous strain of poetry that it
had yet attempted. The perspicuity for which it has always been
remarked, and to which it owes its charms in conversation as perhaps
also the dificulty with which it is adapted to works of poetical
imagination, is strongly exemplified in his translation of Paradise
Lost. If he has not always been able to make the french idiom bear him
through the aetherial regions in which the daring wing of Milton's muse
soars with so sublime a flight, he has descended not without dignity to
the sphere of human understanding. And I believe it may be safely
advanced, that it will be easier for ordinary capacities, even among
English readers, to understand the work of Milton, in this translation
than in the original.

* * * * *

ARGUMENT.

AEneas, after escaping from the destruction of Troy and a long series of
adventures by sea and land, is driven by a storm raised by the hatred of
Juno on the coast of Affrica, where he is received by Dido, in the new
town of Carthage, which she was building, after her flight from the
cruelty of her brother in law Pigmalion, who had murdered her husband
Sicheus.--Venus dreading for her son AEneas, the influence of Juno upon
the mind of Dido, makes Cupid assume the forme of his child Julus or
Ascanius, and raise in the bosom of the Queen the most ungovernable
passion for AEneas. The fourth book begins by Dido's confessing her
weakness to her sister Anna, who gives her many plausible reasons for
indulging it, and advices her to make her peace with heaven and marry
her lover. Juno, finding herself outwitted by Venus and her