Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 354, April 1845

"Manibus date lilia plenis," &c. —

must be weakened, if the moment of the transition is to fall, as we see it in Dryden, at the interval between verse and verse, and not, as we have just seen it with Virgil, at the juncture within the verse of hemistich with hemistich.

"Tu Marcellus eris. – Manibus date lilia plenis," &c.

There is a pause in that line, during which the mother, had she not swooned, might have calmed her heart!

It is usual to discover that Virgil wants originality – that he transcribes his battles from Homer. In truth, it was not easy, with fights of the Homeric ages, to do otherwise. However, Virgil has done otherwise, if any one will be at the pains to look.

For instance, an incident, not in the battles by the Xanthus, is the following: —

A powerful Tuscan warrior, infuriated by the ill fighting of his men, distinguishes himself by an extraordinary feat. Clasping round the body, and so unhorsing a lighter antagonist, he rides off with him; snaps the javelin, which his captive still grasps, near the head, and with its point probes and aims for a vulnerable place. The unfortunate Latine, as he lies across the horse's neck, struggles, and will baffle the deathly blow. Landseer could suggest no more vivid comparison, than one which leaps into your own imagination – a snake soused upon by an eagle.

"So stoops the yellow eagle from on high,And bears a speckled serpent through the sky,Fastening his crooked talons on the prey:The prisoner hisses through the liquid way;Resists the royal hawk, and though oppresst,She fights in columns and erects her crest:Turn'd to her foe, she stiffens every scale,And shoots her forky tongue, and whisks her threat'ning tail.Against the victor all defence is weak;The imperial bird still plies her with his beak,He tears her bowels, and her heart he gores,Then clasps his pinions and securely soars."

A glorious paraphrase!

This is an incident more like a knight of Ariosto's, the terrible Sarazin Rhodomont, or Orlando himself, than Homer's, who did not, indeed, combat on horseback.

But speaking of the moderns, we will venture to say, that if Virgil has copied, he is also an original who has been copied. And we will ask, who is the prototype of the ladies, turned knights, who flourish in favour with our poets of romance? – with Ariosto, with Tasso, with our own Spenser? Who but the heroic virgin ally of the Rutulian prince – who but Camilla?

We name her, however, neither for her own sake, nor for Virgil's, but for Dryden's, who seems also to have taken her into favour, and to have written, with a peculiar spirit and feeling, the parts of the poem which represent her in action.

She leads her Amazons into Italian fields, warring against the fate-driven fugitives of overthrown Troy. Whence were her Amazon followers? Whence is She? Her history her divine patroness, Diana, relates. Her father, the strong-limbed, rude-souled Metabus, a wild and intractable Volscian king, fled from the face and from the pursuit of his people. He bore, in his arms, one dear treasure; a companion of his flight; yet an infant – this daughter. He flies. The Amasenus, in flood, bars his way. More doubtful for his charge than for himself, hastily, with love-prompted art, he swathes the babe in stripped bark – binds her to the shaft of his huge oaken spear – dedicates her with a prayer to the virgin goddess of woods, and of the woodland chase – hurls, from a gigantic hand, the weapon across the tempestuous flood – and, ere his pursuers have reached him, plunges in, breasts the waters, and, saving and saved, swims across. In the forest depths, amongst imbosoming hills, the rugged sire fosters the vowed follower of Diana. The nursling of the wild grows up a bold and skilled huntress; and now that war storms in the land, she, with her huntress companions, joins the war. Some unexplained reconciliation, or perhaps restoration, has taken effect; for, along with her armed maidens, she leads the troops of the Volscians. In the field she fights like a virago; but her entrance thither was against the desire of the goddess, for it dooms her to die. Her eager following of a gorgeously armed warrior exposes her to a treacherous aim, and she falls. The provident goddess had put her own bow, and an arrow from her own quiver, into the hands of a nymph chosen to execute the vengeance of the impending death, and that arrow flies to its mark.

"Nor, after that, in towns which walls enclose,Would trust his hunted life amidst his foes;But, rough, in open air he chose to lie;Earth was his couch, his covering was the sky.On hills unshorn, or in a desert den,He shunn'd the dire society of men.A shepherd's solitary life he led;His daughter with the milk of mares he fed.The dugs of bears, and every savage beast,He drew, and through her lips the liquor press'd.The little amazon could scarcely go,He loads her with a quiver and a bow;And, that she might her staggering steps command,He with a slender javelin fills her hand.Her flowing hair no golden fillet bound;Nor swept her trailing robe the dusty ground.Instead of these, a tiger's hide o'erspreadHer back and shoulders, fasten'd to her head.The flying dart she first attempts to fling,And round her tender temples toss'd the sling;Then as her strength with years increased, beganTo pierce aloft in air the soaring swan,And from the clouds to fetch the heron and the crane.The Tuscan matrons with each other vied,To bless their rival sons with such a bride;But she disdains their love, to share with meThe sylvan shades, and vow'd virginity.And oh! I wish, contented with my caresOf savage spoils, she had not sought the wars.Then had she been of my celestial train,And shunn'd the fate that dooms her to be slain.But since, opposing heaven's decree, she goesTo find her death among forbidden foes,Haste with these arms, and take thy steepy flight,Where, with the gods adverse, the Latins fight.This bow to thee, this quiver, I bequeath,This chosen arrow, to avenge her death:By whate'er hand Camilla shall be slain,Or of the Trojan or Italian train,Let him not pass unpunish'd from the plain.Then, in a hollow cloud, myself will aidTo bear the breathless body of my maid:Unspoil'd shall be her arms, and unprofanedHer holy limbs with any human hand,And in a marble tomb laid in her native land."

What is Virgil's in this fair and romantically cast fiction? What hints did the traditionary fable give him? You are not concerned to make an enquiry which you have no means of satisfying. You must hold Camilla to be as much Virgil's as any thing is Homer's in the Iliad. The painting throughout is to the life, and perfectly graceful. The subject was one likely to attach the imagination of a modern poet, and you feel all along, that pleasure inspirits the happy translation of Dryden.

The Destruction of Troy, the Love of Dido, the Descent into Hell, entire Cantos of the poem, take deep and lasting possession of every reader; and, like the first and second books of the Paradise Lost, too much seduce admiration from the remainder of the work. You pick out from the whole Italian war, Lausus, Pallas, Nisus, and Euryalus, and think that you have done with Virgil.

We beg to propose a literary experiment. Homer has left us two poems – a War, and a Wandering. Virgil has bequeathed us one, representing those two, and that proportionally; although in the Latin the Odyssey comes first, and the Iliad follows. For the first six Æneids relate the wandering; whilst the latter six display the war. Let us, therefore, fairly cut the great outrolling, unfolding picture in two, and have two poems, distinct, although closely allied; twins, moulded in one womb, nourished from the same blood. We dare to predict that the poem of "Æneas in Italy," now considered with its own independent interests, and after its own art and management, will duly compete with its rival, "Æneas 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 Æneas 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 Iliad; but an original one – proper to person and place.

1

Raphael was born in 1483, Michael Angelo in 1474.

2

"Μὴ μὰν ἀσπουδει γε καὶ ἀκλειῶς ἀπολοίμην᾽Αλλὰ μέγα ῥέξας τι καὶ ἐσσομενοιοι πυθέσθαι." Iliad, XXII. 304.

3

We were about to make some remarks on the alleged production of animated globules in albumen by electricity; but we find that, in a note to the third edition, the author virtually relinquishes this ground. We had made enquiries amongst scientific men; but no such experiment had been received or accredited amongst them.

4

"In tracing the series of fossiliferous formations, from the most ancient to the more modern, the first deposits in which we meet with assemblages of organic remains having a near analogy to the Fauna of certain parts of the globe in our own time, are those commonly called tertiary. Even in the Eocene, or oldest subdivision of these tertiary formations, some few of the testacea belong to existing species, although almost all of them, and apparently all the associated vertebrata, are now extinct. These Eocene strata are succeeded by a great number of modern deposits, which depart gradually in the character of their fossils from the Eocene type, and approach more and more to that of the living creation. In the present state of science, it is chiefly by the aid of shells that we are enabled to arrive at the results; for, of all classes, the testacea are the most generally diffused in a fossil state, and may be called the medals principally employed by nature in recording the chronology of past events. In the Miocene deposits, which succeed next to the Eocene, we begin to find a considerable number, although still a minority, of recent species intermixed with some fossils common to the preceding epoch. We then arrive at the Pliocene strata, in which species now contemporary with man begin to preponderate, and in the newest of which nine-tenths of the fossils agree with species still inhabiting the neighbouring sea.

"In thus passing from the older to the newer members of the tertiary system, we meet with many chasms; but none which separate entirely, and by a broad line of demarcation, one state of the organic world from another. There are no signs of an abrupt termination of one Fauna and Flora, and the starting into life of new and wholly distinct forms. Although we are far from being able to demonstrate geologically an insensible transition from the Eocene to the recent Fauna, yet we may affirm that the more we enlarge and perfect our survey of Europe, the more nearly do we approximate to such a continuous series, and the more gradually are we conducted from times when many of the genera and nearly all the species were extinct, to those in which scarcely a single species flourished which we do not know to exist at present." – Lyell's Principles of Geology. Vol. i. p. 283.

5

This lower jaw is described in another part of the work as showing in the human embryo the last trace of the monkey.

6

Printed at Dublin for Philip Dixon Hardy & Sons, 1842.

7

A place in Ireland?

8

We subjoin the original Etruscan text as read by our author, with its alleged Irish equivalents.

Bucucum: iubiu: pune: ubef: furfath: tref: bitluf: turuf: | marte: thurie: fetu: pupleeper: tutas: hubinas: tutaper: icubina: | batuba: ferine: fetu: puni: fetu: arbic: ustentu: cutep: pes- nimu.

Bu co com iudh be in Pune u be fa for fath tre fa be at lu fa tur u fa | mer ta tur i e fad u prob lu bar to ta is i iudh be i na is to ta bar i co be i na | ba do ba fa ain e fad u Puni fad u ar be iudh us tan do co taib be sni mo.

9

It appears that the Royal Irish Academy had refused to publish these speculations in its Transactions. We are surprised they should have admitted some others of the same stamp, to which reference is made further on.

10

"Now, as Serapio was about to have added something of the same nature, the stranger, taking the words out of his mouth – I am wonderfully pleased, said he, to hear discourses upon such subjects as these; but am constrained to claim your first promise, to tell the reason wherefore now the Pythian prophetess no longer delivers her oracles in poetic numbers and measures. Upon which Theo interposing – It cannot be denied, said he, but that there have been great changes and innovations in reference to poetry and the sciences, yet it is as certain that from all antiquity oracles have been delivered in prose. For we find in Thucydides that the Lacedæmonians, desirous to know the issue of the war then entered into against the Athenians, were answered in prose." * * * "And so of Dinomenes the Sicilian, Procles, tyrant of Epidaurus and Timarchus; and, which is more, the oracular answers, according to which Lycurgus conferred the form of the Lacedæmonian commonwealth, were also so given." —Plutarch. Moral.

11

Death of Wallenstein, Act v. Scene 1, (Coleridge's Translation,) relating to his remembrances of the younger Piccolomini.

12

"Like the dry corpse which stood upright." – See the Second Book of Kings, chap. xiii. v. 20 and 21. Thirty years ago this impressive incident was made the subject of a large altar-piece by Mr Alston, an interesting American artist, then resident in London.

13

"African Obeah." – Thirty-years ago it would not have been necessary to say one word of the Obi or Obeah magic; because at that time several distinguished writers (Miss Edgeworth, for instance, in her Belinda) had made use of this superstition in fictions, and because the remarkable history of Three-finger'd Jack, a story brought upon the stage, had made the superstition notorious as a fact. Now, however, so long after the case has probably passed out of the public mind, it may be proper to mention – that when an Obeah man, i. e., a professor of this dark collusion with human fears and human credulity, had once woven his dreadful net of ghostly terrors, and had thrown it over his selected victim, vainly did that victim flutter, struggle, languish in the meshes; unless the spells were reversed, he generally perished; and without a wound except from his own too domineering fancy.

14

What follows, I think, (for book I have none of any kind where this paper is proceeding,) viz. et serâ sub nocte rudentum, is probably a mistake of Virgil's; the lions did not roar because night was approaching, but because night brought with it their principal meal, and consequently the impatience of hunger.

15

"Kilcrops." – See, amongst Southey's early poems, one upon this superstition. Southey argues contra; but for my part, I should have been more disposed to hold a brief on the other side.

16

In this place I derive my feeling partly from a lovely sketch of the appearance, in verse, by Mr Wordsworth; partly from my own experience of the case; and, not having the poems here, I know not how to proportion my acknowledgments.

17

"And so, then," the Cynic objects, "you rank your own mind (and you tell us so frankly) amongst the primary formations?" As I love to annoy him, it would give me pleasure to reply – "Perhaps I do." But as I never answer more questions than are necessary, I confine myself to saying, that this is not a necessary construction of the words. Some minds stand nearer to the type of the original nature in man, are truer than others to the great magnet in our dark planet. Minds that are impassioned on a more colossal scale than ordinary, deeper in their vibrations, and more extensive in the scale of their vibrations – whether, in other parts of their intellectual system, they had or had not a corresponding compass – will tremble to greater depths from a fearful convulsion, and will come round by a longer curve of undulations.

18

i. e. (As on account of English readers is added,) the recognition of his true identity, which in one moment, and by a horrid flash of revelation, connects him with acts incestuous, murderous, parricidal, in the past, and with a mysterious fatality of woe lurking in the future.

19

Euripides.