is honourable mention made of it in the history of the second Carthaginian war. It is certain, that they gave him very good education; to which they were inclined, not so much by the dreams of his mother, and those presages which Donatus relates, as by the early indications which he gave of a sweet disposition and excellent wit. He passed the first seven years of his life at Mantua, not seventeen, as Scaliger miscorrects his author; for the initia ætatis can hardly be supposed to extend so far. From thence he removed to Cremona, a noble Roman colony, and afterwards to Milan; in all which places, he prosecuted his studies with great application. He read over all the best Latin and Greek authors; for which he had convenience by the no remote distance of Marseilles, that famous Greek colony, which maintained its politeness and purity of language in the midst of all those barbarous nations amongst which it was seated; and some tincture of the latter seems to have descended from them down to the modern French. He frequented the most eminent professors of the Epicurean philosophy, which was then much in vogue, and will be always, in declining and sickly states. * But, finding no satisfactory account from his master Syron, he passed over to the Academic school; to which he adhered the rest of his life, and deserved, from a great emperor, the title of-The Plato of Poets. He composed at leisure hours a great number of verses on various subjects; and, desirous rather of a great than early fame, he permitted his kinsman * There is great justice in this observation. The prevalence of a system, founded in egotism and self-indulgence, which teaches, that pleasure was the greatest good, and pain the most intolerable evil, as surely indicates the downfal of the state, as the decay of morality. and fellow-student, Varus, to derive the honour of one of his tragedies to himself. Glory, neglected in proper time and place, returns often with large increase and so he found it; for Varus afterwards proved a great instrument of his rise. In short, it was here that he formed the plan, and collected the materials, of all those excellent pieces which he afterwards finished, or was forced to leave less perfect by his death. But, whether it were the unwholesomeness of his native air, of which he somewhere complains; or his too great abstinence, and night-watchings at his study, to which he was always addicted, as Augustus observes; or possibly the hopes of improving himself by travel-he resolved to remove to the more southern tract of Italy; and it was hardly possible for him not to take Rome in his way, as is evident to any one who shall cast an eye on the map of Italy. And therefore the late French editor of his works is mistaken, when he asserts, that he never saw Rome till he came to petition for his estate. He gained the acquaintance of the master of the horse to Octavius, and cured a great many diseases of horses, by methods they had never heard of. It fell out, at the same time, that a very fine colt, which promised great strength and speed, was presented to Octavius; Virgil assured them, that he came of a faulty mare, and would prove a jade: Upon trial, it was found as he had said. His judgment proved right in several other instances; which was the more surprising, because the Romans knew least of natural causes of any civilized nation in the world: and those meteors and prodigies, which cost them incredible sums to expiate, might easily have been accounted for by no very profound naturalist. It is no wonder, therefore, that Virgil was in so great reputation, as to be at last introduced to Octavius himself. That prince was then at variance with Marc Antony, who vexed him with a great many libelling letters, in which he reproaches him with the baseness of his parentage, that he came of a scrivener, a ropemaker, and a baker, as Suetonius tells us. Octavius finding that Virgil had passed so exact a judgment upon the breed of dogs and horses, thought that he possibly might be able to give him some light concerning his own. He took him into his closet, where they continued in private a considerable time. Virgil was a great mathematician; which, in the sense of those times, took in astrology; and, if there be any thing in that art, (which I can hardly believe,) if that be true which the ingenious De la Chambre asserts confidently, that, from the marks on the body, the configuration of the planets at a nativity may be gathered, and the marks might be told by knowing the nativity, never had one of those artists a fairer opportunity to show his skill than Virgil now had; for Octavius had moles upon his body, exactly resembling the constellation called Ursa Major. But Virgil had other helps; the predictions of Cicero and Catulus, and that vote of the senate had gone abroad, that no child, born at Rome in the year of his nativity, should be bred up, because the seers assured them that an emperor was born that year. Besides this, Virgil had heard of the Assyrian and Egyptian prophecies, (which, in truth, were no other but the Jewish,) that about that time a great king was to come into the world. Himself takes notice of them, (Æn. VI.) where he uses a very significant word, now in all liturgies, * * See Suetonius, Life of Octavius, chap. 94. hujus in adventu; so in another place, adventu propiore Dei. At his foreseen approach already quake Nile hears him knocking at his seven-fold gate. Every one knows whence this was taken. It was rather a mistake than impiety in Virgil, to apply these prophecies, which belonged to the Saviour of the world, to the person of Octavius; it being a usual piece of flattery, for near a hundred years together, to attribute them to their emperors and other great men. Upon the whole matter, it is very probable, that Virgil predicted to him the empire at this time. And it will appear yet the more, if we consider, that he assures him of his being received into the number of the gods, in his First Pastoral, long before the thing came to pass; which prediction seems grounded upon his former mistake. This was a secret not to be divulged at that time; and therefore it is no wonder that the slight story in Donatus was given abroad to palliate the matter. But certain it is, that Octavius dismissed him with great marks of esteem, and earnestly recommended the protection of Virgil's affairs to Pollio, then lieutenant of the Cisalpine Gaul, where Virgil's patrimony lay. This Pollio, from a mean original, became one of the most considerable persons of his time; a good general, orator, statesman, historian, poet, and favourer of learned men; above all, he was a man of honour in those critical times. He had joined with Octavius and Antony in revenging the barbarous assassination of Julius Cæsar; when they two were at variance, he would neither follow Antony, whose courses he detested, nor join with Octavius against him, out of a grateful sense of some former obliga tions. Augustus, who thought it his interest to oblige men of principles, notwithstanding this, received him afterwards into favour, and promoted him to the highest honours. And thus much I thought fit to say of Pollio, because he was one of Virgil's greatest friends. Being therefore eased of domestic cares, he pursues his journey to Naples. The charming situation of that place, and view of the beautiful villas of the Roman nobility, equaling the magnificence of the greatest kings; the neighbourhood of Baiæ, whither the sick resorted for recovery, and the statesman when he was politicly sick; whither the wanton went for pleasure, and witty men for good company; the wholesomeness of the air, and improving conversation, the best air of all, contributed not only to the re-establishing his health, but to the forming of his style, and rendering him master of that happy turn of verse, in which he much surpasses all the Latins, and, in a less advantageous language, equals even Homer himself. He proposed to use his talent in poetry, only for scaffolding to build a convenient fortune, that he might prosecute, with less interruption, those nobler studies to which his elevated genius led him, and which he describes in these admirable lines: Me vero primum dulces ante omnia Musæ, But the current of that martial age, by some strange antiperistasis, drove so violently towards poetry, that he was at last carried down with the stream; for not only the young nobility, but Octavius, and Pollio, Cicero in his old age, Julius |