criticisms, is, to a remarkable degree, the very opposite in his conversation. I communicated to him freely several of my discoveries respecting the meaning of his and my Author; they made no impression on him. I remember in particular with respect to En. II. 521, that he objected to my view of that passage, that the word 'defensor' could not be applied to an inanimate object. I produced to him, the very next day, the word 'defensor' applied by Cesar to piles sunk in a river in order to break the current. Instead of being pleased or convinced, he replied: "How happy you are in your citations!" Phil. E. Wagner is one of the most minute and accurate of Latin grammarians. His eyes are microscopic. If there is a minute bubble floating on the cup, he is the man to detect it, lay hold on it, and explore its interior with the point of a pin or bristle; but ask him is the wine red or white, new or old, sweet or sour, and he does not know what you mean. To Wagner the Eneis is not a poem, but an accidence for teaching schoolboys Latin. His forty one Quaestiones Virgilianae are about what, do you think, gentle reader? about Virgil's splendid imagery? about his extraordinary purity and dignity of diction? about his merits or defects relatively considered to those of Homer, Hesiod, Apollonius, Lucretius, Milton, or Dante? about the plan or scope of the Eneis, or of the Georgics? About Eneas, or Turnus, or Dido, Rome, Carthage, Greece, or Italy? No, gentle reader; they are about 'At', 'Ab', 'Ac', Ad', 'Is', 'In', 'Ex', 'Os', 'On', 'Quis', 'Qui', 'Hic', 'Jam', 'Nec', 'Ve', 'Et', 'Qui', 'Tum', 'Tunc', 'Iste', 'Ipse', 'Ille', and whether, and on what occasions, 'Natus' should be spelled with a 'G' prefixed. I neither joke, exaggerate, nor pervert; such, no less in spirit than in letter, are the discussions which Ph. E. Wagner has thought proper to dignify with the misnomer, Quaestiones Virgilianae.

Dr. A. Forbiger has inserted into his third edition short notices of, and extracts from, my observations on

b

the first and second Books, as they were published in the Classical Museum (Lond. 1848); also of my observations on the third, fourth, fifth and sixth Books, communicated to him orally in Leipzig in 1851. Forbiger's notices of my views being extremely brief, and my views themselves having been greatly altered and enlarged since 1851, no notion whatever either of the nature and scope, or of the particulars of the following work, can be formed from Forbiger's notices. I found Forbiger ready to admit new light to shine on his Author, even when he himself was not the point of radiation. No other commentator or editor of Virgil whom I have met, would permit of a new planet's throwing its light on the Virgilian Earth.

In 1850 Cardinal Angelo Mai received me in Rome with perfect politeness and as perfect heartlessness; embraced me with both his arms, kissed me on both my cheeks, but, though Head Librarian of the Vatican, stirred no finger on my behalf; afforded me no facilities whatever for my investigations. At my first interview with him I made him a present of my first Virgilian essay, The first Two Books of the Eneis rendered into Blank Iambic, with new Interpretations and Illustrations. Remaining in Rome for some months and hearing no word from him, I wrote him a note to the following effect:

"Having become convinced that the book, with which I had the honor some time ago to present your Eminence, and for which I have great value, is to your Eminence of no value at all, I will esteem it an especial favor if your Eminence kindly return it to me, and so restore his strayed child to the weeping and disconsolate parent."

The Cardinal, it seems, either did not understand the joke, or shut his eyes against satire coming from so obscure a quarter, and returned me the book, accompanied by the usual insincere, complimentary

note. When I came to Milan, I heard at the Ambrosian Library, where Mai was well known before his promotion to the Cardinalate (having been there employed by the directors of the Library to publish the Homeric pictures), that I only met from him the treatment to be expected by all persons who know so little of Mai as to suppose that he wishes success to any literary efforts but his own.

I received polite attention from Dr. Dozio, Subprefect of the Ambrosian Library. He presented me with the Commentaries of Cynthius Cenetensis, recently edited by him from a MS. in the Library. The lucubrations of Cynthius Cenetensis like those of Philargyrius, and of the Interpretes Virgilii edited by Mai from the Verona Palimpsest, are utterly worthless; mere grammatical, and not even grammatical, nugae; learned dust which were better swept out.

§ III.

Some further particulars relating to this Voyage, to my Six Photographs of the Heroic Times, and to myself.

I have been, as the title imports, twelve years, twelve of the fairest years of my life, engaged in this work; encouraged by no one, approved by no one, patronised by no one; receiving no particle of assistance either at home or abroad from any one of all the numerous persons who have with more or less success cultivated the same author, except alone the assistance which I have reared and created for myself in my own daughter, who has already, at the age of twenty two, arrived at such a degree of knowledge of the subject, that I have not printed a single Comment without first submitting it to her censorship. Many and valuable have been the suggestions I have received

from her, although I have not specially stated the fact except at En. II. 683. The work is entirely original; all the views put forward (unless where the contrary is expressly stated) exclusively my own; wherever I have at first put forward a view as my own, which I have afterwards discovered to have been previously held by any one else, I have expunged the passage. If any such passages remain unexpunged, it is by such mere accident as must occasionally occur in a work of such extensive research. I have even been careful not to quote (unless where I have had new matter to bring forward respecting it) any parallel or illustrative passage which has been previously quoted; and on this account have rarely, if ever, quoted Homer, all the parallelisms of that author having been suffi ciently pointed out and discussed by preceding ob

servers.

These Commentaries, however, are not the sole fruit of my twelve years' labor; I have pari passu transferred the six Books of the Eneis into my native language. That work has been a more Herculean task than even this. Indeed this arose out of that, and may be considered as a mere appendage of that, all these Commentaries having grown out of the searches which I found it necessary to make into the meaning of each separate sentence before I could honestly undertake to transfer the sentence into English. As I went on, I found that almost every sentence had been more or less misunderstood, and afforded materials for a separate Commentary. Hence the present work. The reader will perhaps think that, the meaning once ascertained, the transference into English followed almost as a matter of course; he is greatly mistaken; a full half of the difficulty remained; viz. to convert that meaning into English poetry; to express myself so that my sentence should give, first, the true meaning of Virgil; secondly, the whole of that true meaning; and thirdly,

nothing but that true meaning; and should, at the same time, be easy, free, natural and fluent English poetry. No one had ever succeeded in such attempt either in the English or any other language. In every instance. either the sentence became. not vernacular poetry, or the meaning not Virgil's. I tried and failed, tried and failed, tried and failed, until I was weary, exhausted and despairing. It was not possible to succeed even in a single sentence. I translated, twice over, the whole of the six Books into English Iambic without rhyme. The two first Books of each of these translations I even printed; I had succeeded tolerably well to express the meaning, but the verse was stiff and un-English, just as Voss's similar translation is stiff and un-German. The work was sure not to be read except by scholars. I was not deterred; I persevered and labored on; tried, like a snake or worm writhing itself out of a hole, to wriggle myself now this way, now that; all in vain; the measure was unyielding, must have its alternately short and long syllable, Iwould not be forced to meet Virgil's sense; while, at the same time, Virgil's sense was unyielding, would not be forced to meet the measure. In this dilemma, I determined at last to change my hand, and to vary the measure to alter my rythm according to the exigencies of the sense. "The poem, said I to myself, "will be the more agreeable if the rythm be occasionally changed. The chief defect in Virgil's great poem is the monotony inseparable from the uninterrupted succession to each other of ten thousand hexameters; the attention at last wanders involuntarily; the mind roves in search of variety, as the eyes of the spectator soon turn away from the most beautiful picture, tired of its very beauty." I made an infinity of trials, and at last found that I could represent the sense of perhaps two or three pages in succession, in one kind of metre, provided I was then allowed, perhaps for the sake of a single