granted to Virgil should be also allowed to him, viz. to toss about his dung with an air of gracefulness. Lord Shaftesbury was ready to yield all veneration to the three Goddesses, who had always warmed his fancy with the brightest ideas. This noble writer was succeeded by the Lord Viscount Bolingbroke, who, by the way, declared himself an enemy to all forms of worship. He avowed at the same time, that he was readier to pay adoration to those bright existences, than to the God of Moses or the God of Paul, on which topics he harangued with a roll of periods, in which, though he did not advance the strict truth, he deserved at least to be called, in the words of a witty satirist, a polite apostate from God's grace to wit.' His Lordship withdrew, and I perceived some certain modern periodical writers entering the temple. They approached the altar with a college mien, and a pompous affectation of learned industry. Though no charge could be brought against them for want of matter, their style appeared too elaborate, and their words frequently formed an exotic dialect of adventitious phrases, by which means all ease was discarded from their writings; and where ease is wanting, grace will be always deficient. brother Emboldened by the example of my writers, methought I approached the altar; but I was told by Euphrosyne, that I advanced with rather too great an air of negligence, and the goddess advised me to avoid the appearance of thoughtlessness, while I endeavoured to be easy and graceful. I was so stung with this reproach, that my repose was instantly disturbed, and, when awakened, I pleased myself in the reflection that the whole was but a dream. GRAYS-INN JOURNAL, No. 51. No. XCVII. The gen'rous critic fann'd the poet's fire, To dress her charms, and make her more belov❜d. IN Mr. Pitt's very estimable translation of the Eneid, a critical observation upon a passage in the sixth book is extracted from one of the most judicious writers of our times, the Rambler. The lucubrations of this admirable ge nius, whom, however far I fall short of, I will, upon this occasion, venture to call my predecessor, have constantly been perused, and I may say studied by me with very great delight: So much sense, judgment, and morality, flow throughout those papers, that I look upon them as a model of writing, which does honour to our nation, and which must be always acceptable to the virtuous and the wise. As I pretend not to rank myself with the latter, I hope the former will give me shelter on account of my sex, and because I publicly, but humbly, endeavour to be serviceable to the age in which I live. As there are comments upon that immortal poem, as well as translations of it, in more than one language that I understand, I have very attentively considered such as have come to my hands, recommended for an excellence by those who are learned in the original; upon this foundation I shall offer a conjecture of mine upon the silence of Dido at the sight of Æneas in the Elysian fields, and shall venture to assign for it a very different reason from any that I have yet met with, submitting my conjectures to the judgment of my readers. I agree entirely with all the commentators that have fallen within my observation, who have celebrated the beauty of Ajax's silence in the thirteenth book of the Odyssey; and will suppose with them, that Virgil copied the silence of Dido from his great master the Mæonian bard. The silence of the son of Telamon was undoubtedly founded in pride, and proceeded from a consciousness of his own defects in the art of eloquence, and therefore I join with the Rambler in thinking that the sullen taciturnity of Ajax had a much more contemptuous and piercing effect, "than any words which so rude an orator could have found." But the silence of Dido appears to me to have arisen from another cause a cause a cause extremely natural, and parti cularly beautiful in the manner that Virgil, with his usual distant and insinuative delicacy, has introduced it. I make no difficulty to pronounce that her silence proceeded from shame; not from the shame of seeing Æneas, the sight of whom must have roused her, as the Rambler justly observes, into clamour, reproach, and denunciation, but from the sight and presence of the most virtuous of all women, the Cumæan Sibyl. Such an unexpected guest, stifled at once every sentiment of fury, and choked every intended purport of rancour and revenge, in the Carthaginian queen. I am now to endeavour to prove my assertion. The menaces of Dido were not only that her vengeance, but that her ghost, should follow Æneas wherever he went: as evidently appears from what she says to him in their last interview at Carthage: When death's cold hand my struggling soul shall free, PITT. The immutable laws of Pluto's kingdom hindered her from fulfilling her intentions. Her ghost was not permitted to follow the Trojan hero into the higher regions, but her ghost was not prohibited to speak to him, or to answer |