(u) V. 244.—Fontem superare Timavi. "Restat ut hoc moneamus, fontem Timavi h. 1. pro ipso Timavo dici." Heyne, Exc. 7, ad En. 1. But if fontem Timavi signify ipsum (sciz. fluvium) Timavum, unde must be equivalent to ex quo fluvio Timavo; and how it is possible to render ex quo fluvio Timavo it mare proruptum, et pel. pr. ar. son., so that it shall not be downright nonsense, I cannot perceive. Unde-it. "Hinc ille it." Heyne. Ibid. But ille must refer either to fontem Timavi, or Timavi; if to the former, the sentence fontem superare Timavi unde ille (sciz. fons Timavi) it, is nonsense, whether Fons Timavi be understood in its simple and literal meaning, or with Heyne, as equivalent to fluvius Timavus; if to the latter, the structure contradicts the Latin idiom, which requires the pronoun to be supplied from the whole, not from a portion of the preceding subject, and in conformity with which it is impossible to doubt that Virgil (if he had intended to express that the fluvius Timavus issued from the fountain) would have written fontem superare unde Timavus it.

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altogether repugnant to the good taste and the practice of Virgil. 3rdly-If this interpretation be correct, pelago premit arva sonanti is little more than a mere tautology of, it mare proruptum. All these difficulties, or, to speak more correctly, all these absurdities, may be got rid of, by entirely throwing away the interpretations of the commentators, and translating the sentence according to the plain and natural construction, and the literal meaning of the words. Fontem superare Timavi, unde, (sciz. ex quo fonte Timavi) mare proruptum it, the burstforth sea goes (i.e., the sea bursts forth), et pel. pr. arv. son. Or, in plain prose, the sea communicates subterraneously with and bursts out through the fountain of Timavus, making a roaring noise, and deluging the fields, (pelago) with the salt water. Understanding the passage thus, we not only give to fontem Timavi, and mare proruptum, their plain and literal meaning, and to the verb it the nominative, with which Virgil (as if to prevent all possibility of mistake) has placed it in immediate juxta-position, but obtain an explanation why Antenor is said to have passed not the river but the fountain Timavus, sciz., because it was not the river which was the remarkable object, but the fountain, out of which the sea used (probably in certain states only of the wind and tide) to burst with a roaring noise. I cannot comprehend how so acute a scholar as Heyne should not only have been aware of a subterranean communication between the sea and the

(y) V. 292.-Cana Fides et Vesta, &c. The simple meaning is that men, ceasing from war, shall live as they did in the good old times, when they obeyed the precepts of Fides, Vesta, and Remus and Romulus. [See next note.] It is sufficiently evident from Georg. i, 498; ii, 533, that the deities here mentioned were specially associated by the Roman mythology with that primitive epoch of the national history, to which the Romans (sharing a feeling common to all civilised nations that have ever existed) loved to look back as an epoch of peace and innocence; for this reason and no other are they specified as the gods of the returning golden age here announced by Jupiter. I am unwilling so far to derogate from the dignity of this sentiment, as to suppose, with Heyne, that it contains an allusion to the trivial circumstance of the temples of Fides, Vesta, and Remus and Romulus being seated on the Palatine hill near the palace of Augustus; nor do I think it necessary to discuss the opinion advanced by the late Mr. Seward, and preserved by Hayley, in one of the notes to his second Epistle on Epic Poetry, that the meaning is, that civil and criminal justice shall be administered in those temples, that opinion being based on the erroneous interpretation of jura dabunt, pointed out in note to v. 293.

The whole of this enunciation of the fates by Jupiter is one magnificent strain of adulation of Augustus. A similar adulation, although somewhat more disguised, is plainly to be read in every word of Venus's

complaint to Jupiter, and in the very circumstance of the interview between the queen of love and beauty and the Pater hominumque deûmque; that interview having for its sole object the fortunes of Eneas, Augustus's ancestor, and the foundation by him of that great Roman empire, of which Augustus was now the absolute master and head. Nor is the adulation of Augustus confined to those parts of the Eneis, in which, as in the passages before us, there is reference to him by name or distinct allusion; it pervades the whole poem from beginning to end; and could not have been least pleasing to a person of so refined a taste, where it is least direct, and where the praise is bestowed, not upon himself, but upon that famous goddess-born ancestor, from whom it was his greatest pride and boast that he was descended. Not that I suppose, with Warburton and Spence, either that the character of Augustus is adumbrated in that of Eneas, or that the Eneis is a political poem, having for its object to reconcile the Roman nation to the newly settled order of things; on the contrary, I agree with Heyne that there are no sufficient grounds for either of these opinions, and that they are each of them totally inconsistent with the boldness and freedom necessary to a great epic. But nevertheless, without going so far as Warburton or Spence, I am certainly of opinion that Virgil wrote the Eneis in honor of Augustus: that he selected Eneas for his hero, chiefly because, as Augustus's reputed ancestor, and the first founder of the Roman empire, his praises would