lines are true to Pagan feeling, "The low beach and silent gloom, And chilling mists of that dull river, Along whose bank the thin ghosts shiver, The thin, wan ghosts that once were (Callista, Chapter x).

men

"

481. Nay, the very home of death was astounded.' C. renders 'a charm fell on the very,' etc. ipsae includes the place and the Furies and Cerberus too.

482. Tartarus is the lowest abyss of hell: see Aen. VI, 577. 484. Ixion, king of the Lapithae in Thessaly, was bound fast to a wheel in Tartarus as punishment for his crimes. rota orbis, 'the circle of the wheel,' for orbis rotae. vento, 'the wind fell,' abl. of the instrument: condensed for 'from lack of wind.' See C. on Ecl. 11, 26, cum placidum ventis staret mare.

487. hanc legem, 'this condition,' same as foedera at l. 493, namely that Orpheus should not look back till both had reached the upper air.

489. Manes, properly the shades but here 'the Powers below,' Pluto and Proserpina.

490-2. Eurydicenque suam, 'E. was now his own, treading on the very threshold of daylight," C., "when alas! he forgot, and no longer master of himself he looked back. That instant all his toil was spilt like water." animi is the locative case. victus, 'overpowered by passion.' Note the effect of the sudden check in the metre and sense after respexit. The four brief words which follow are thus made to emphasize the sudden transformation wrought by Orpheus' error.

493. foedera, 'the covenant.' fragor, 'a thunder-crash.' This reminds us of the appalling effectiveness of the subterranean thunder, which accompanies the passing of Oedipus in Sophocles' play.

495. 'Woe is me! what madness, what monstrous madness has destroyed both me and thee?' I cannot agree with Mackail in rendering, 'Who hath destroyed me?' etc. The repeated quis is inconsistent with this meaning. retro is used vaguely but effectively. The Fates were not calling E. back 'a second time.'

496. 'Swimming eyes' suggests to us weeping. But here it denotes dim and flickering sight, so used at Aen. v, 856 of the pilot's eyes overpowered by sleep.

497. The vast night closes round me and I am borne away.' nocte. A minute before they were just emerging into daylight.

500. fugit diversa, 'she vanished right away from him.' diversa means 'in the opposite direction,' here almost = back

wards.' tenues qualifies auras: the air is as unsubstantial as the disembodied spirit.

501. umbras, not a poetic plural denoting the spirit of E.: Orpheus clutches at the darkness which has swallowed her up, but in which he yet strives to grasp her.

502. praeterea, ‘any longer': so at Aen. 1, 49 et quisquam nomen Iunonis adorat Praeterea?

503. obiectam paludem, 'the barrier of marsh,' i.e. Styx.

504-527

505. Blackmore renders: 'All moans, all music were but waste of breath.' manes, in same sense as at l. 489, includes, acc. to C., "the Powers below as well as the shades subject to them." In this line may not numina movere mean 'to bend the decrees' of those deities? the old Italian conception of Numen being, as Dr Fowler has shown, a manifestation of will-power rather than a personal deity, R.E.R., p. 118. Thus at Aen. VIII, 574 numina vestra, addressed to Jupiter, means 'Thy august will.' Or does Orpheus in his frenzy forget that the Gods of the upper world have no jurisdiction here?

506. nabat. Cf. the German colloquial Er schwimmt, 'He is on a voyage.'

509. evolvisse, probably a metaphor from unrolling a book. 511. populea sub umbra. In his Year with the Birds, Dr Warde Fowler says that this, the single passage in which V. mentions the nightingale, is inferior in truth to Homer's lines on which it is based. V. has chosen the most thinly-leaved of all trees, whereas its habit is to sing amidst thick cover, nor does he refer to the variety of its song. Homer (Od. xix, 518) truthfully describes the bird as ‘singing from amid the thick leafage of the trees and pouring forth her manytoned music with many a varied turn.' But he now holds that the poet was, after all, perfectly true to nature. He actually heard the bird singing populea sub umbra. It was perched on the lower branch of a tall Lombardy poplar, which grew out of a thick undergrowth of willow, alder, etc., in which no doubt the nest was....The ploughman discovers the nest in the scrub and the bird retires to a poplar branch to give voice to its grief (Class. Rev. for 1890, p. 49). By an oversight the former opinion stands repeated in a later edition of the book (1902). But Dr Fowler writes me that his opinion of 1890 is unchanged, and that the bird does, on occasion, sing in the open.

513. observans, 'has marked.' "The word is used loosely, to supply the want of an aorist participle, the sense being 'observatos detraxit,'" C. Note the pause after detraxit which calls attention back to the bird.

516. Venus, 'love.' flexere, 'had power over.'

517, 518. The Hyperboreans, a fabulous people whom Homer conceives as living 'beyond the North Wind': the term came to mean simply 'most northerly.' Tanais, the river Don in central Russia. Rhipaeis, giant mountains believed to separate the Hyperboreans from the rest of the world: the Urals probably gave rise to the legend.

519. Note the emphatic position of raptam and irrita.

520. The Cicones were a Thracian tribe near the mouth of the Hebrus. munus means 'a service,' and is specially used of funeral honours; 'slighted by such devotion,' i.e. by his undying constancy to Eurydice.

521. orgia, 'revels.'

523. tum quoque, 'even then.'

524. Oeagrus was King of Thrace and father of Orpheus. 525. vox ipsa, 'his voice of itself,' i.e. even though life had fled.

526. 'Kept calling with his last fleeting breath.'

527. toto flumine, 'all down the stream,' a local ablative like caelo in G. 1, 6 where see note.

559-566

559. haec canebam, 'such is the song I was making on the tending of fields and cattle.' 'Canebam is probably the common imperfect as used in correspondence," says C., "referring to the time when a letter is read not when it was written," and it thus suggests that the successes of Caesar were still going on when the Georgics were finished.

560-1. Caesar magnus, ‘Caesar the great,' as if conferring a title upon him. After the victory at Actium in 31 B.C. Augustus marched triumphantly through Syria and Asia Minor. But there was no fighting. Hence fulminat bello is here an exaggeration. Victor and volentes qualify each other, 'a welcome conqueror.' The phrase iura dare, 'to dispense laws,' occurs in Horace, Odes III, 3 triumphatis dare iura Medis, but the context is very different. In volentes V. claims for Augustus that his world-empire is no mere reign of brute force but that his justice secures the allegiance of his subjects.

562. affectat "almost ingreditur," C. 'Essays the path to heaven'; is working his way to immortality and godship.

Olympo, poetic use for ad Olympum, cf. facilis descensus Averno, Aen. VI, 126. After Augustus had settled affairs in Parthia, it was decreed that his name should be included along with those of the Gods in the public forms of religious service. Dio

5I, C. 20.

563. ‘I, V., was being nurtured in the lap of sweet Parthenope, delighting in the pursuits of inglorious ease.'

564. florentem, lit. ‘blossoming,' often used to express the high-tide of youth, the 'Blüthezeit' or blossoming-time. But Cicero, writing to the philosopher, Nigidius Figulus (Ep. IV, 13), has studia, artes quibus a pueritia floruisti. On the use of floreo in Virgil see Fowler's interesting note (Gathering of the Clans, p. 87). 564. Parthenope. Naples, so named after a Siren believed to have been buried there.

565. audax iuventa, because he was the first to imitate Theocritus by writing Idylls in Latin.

lusi, 'who once played with shepherds' songs.' Ludo to do anything in sport or for pastime. The term is here highly significant, V. employs it repeatedly in speaking of his own early poetry (at Ecl. 1, 10; vi, 1; vII, 17). By using it again he intends us to know that he regarded his Eclogues, however perfect of their kind, as a work of his youth, something which he had outgrown.

The writer of the Georgics and Aeneid (the latter no doubt already planned and half-completed) must have felt that the setting of the Eclogues, presenting all classes of men as shepherds, was artificial and a fashion of the time. These closing words indicate the spirit of the poet, who disowned his own early writings, who was always striving after higher achievement. The thunders of war waged by the great Ruler of Rome have made themselves heard amid his silvan quiet. V. too feels himself bound to a greater task than before for his country's sake. These closing lines seem to breathe the noble ambition which Virgil, speaking in his own name, seems to transfer to his hero when, after the sacramental meeting with his father's spirit, Aeneas rises with enlargement of soul and devotion to a full acceptance of the duties of his career

maior rerum mihi nascitur ordo1.

1 Aen. VII, 44. In a chapter on Religious Feeling in Virgil," Dr W. Fowler has subtly and convincingly traced the development of the character of Aeneas, as he rises in the course of the story into the heroic type, the turning-point of the change being the interview with Anchises in Hades. R.E.R. Lecture XVIII.

ADDENDA

1. Preface, pp. vii-viii. Conington's success as a translator must not be estimated from his verse-rendering of the Aeneid. It is almost inexplicable that one whom Henry calls truly "a scholar at once and a poet" should have chosen for this a metre so repugnant to the genius of Virgil's majestic, yet pliant hexameter as is that of Marmion and the Lady of the Lake with its peculiar rhythm and assonance, its monotonous and incessant rhymes. Our loss is the greater because hardly another man has united in himself in equal degree the intimate mastery of Virgil's most subtle style, the love and reverence for the poet along with the easy command of verse, all of which are necessary in order to reproduce for English readers what Douglas calls The beauty of his ornate eloquence.

"I have read Conington's translation from beginning to end with endless admiration of his extraordinary prosodic skill but with ever-increasing regret that he adopted a metre, which is quite incapable of rendering or suggesting

The stateliest measure ever moulded by the lips of man. Yet, even as it stands, it seems to me that there are passages which, in spite of the cramped scope of the verse, could hardly be bettered in combined felicity of phrase and fidelity of rendering." H. A. W.

2. Introduction, p. xxxvi (foot) add:

Thus at G. II, 149 V. says that in Italy (meaning in certain districts) sheep breed and fruit-trees bear twice a year. It never occurs to him to enquire how such facts stand related, whether as exceptions or as seeming contradictions to the great doctrine of Law in Nature which governs Lucretius's outlook, according to which "we see each thing produced afresh and well-defined periods fixed for things, each after its kind, to reach the flower of their age" (Lucr. 1, 562-4). See note on G. II, 149.

3. G. IV, 37. There is no foundation for the usual assertion that Xenophon speaks of "a Queen-bee" at Oecon. VII, 17, ǹ nyeμшv μÉXITтa, literally "the leader-bee," the article here being feminine. But in two other passages, Cyrop. V, I. 24, and Hell. III, 2. 28, he uses the same two words along with the masculine article. Remembering that μMitra, like apis