Cæsar, and the stoical Brutus, a little before, would needs be tampering with the Muses. The two latter had taken great care to have their poems curiously bound, and lodged in the most famous libraries; but neither the sacredness of those places, nor the greatness of their names, could preserve ill poetry. Quitting therefore the study of the law, after having pleaded but one cause with indifferent success, he resolved to push his fortune this way, which he seems to have discontinued for some time; and that may be the reason why the Culer, his first pastoral now extant, has little besides the novelty of the subject, and the moral of the fable, which contains an exhortation to gratitude, to recommend it. Had it been as correct as his other pieces, nothing more proper and pertinent could have at that time been addressed to the young Octavius; for, the year in which he presented it, probably at Baiæ, seems to be the very same in which that prince consented (though with seeming reluctance) to the death of Cicero, under whose consulship he was born, the preserver of his life, and chief instrument of his advancement. There is no reason to question its being genuine, as the late French editor does ; its meanness, in comparison of Virgil's other works, (which is that writer's only objection,) confutes himself; for Martial, who certainly saw the true copy, speaks of it with contempt; and yet that pastoral equals, at least, the address to the Dauphin, which is prefixed to the late edition. Octavius, to unbend his mind from application to public business, took frequent turns to Baix, and Sicily, where he composed his poem called Sicelides, which Virgil seems to allude to in the pastoral beginning Sicelides Musæ. This gave him opportunity of refreshing that prince's memory of him; and about that time he wrote his Etna. Soon after he seems to have made a voyage to Athens, and at his return presented his Ceiris, a more elaborate piece, to the noble and eloquent Messala. The forementioned author groundlessly taxes this as supposititious; for, besides other critical marks, there are no less than fifty or sixty verses, altered, indeed, and polished, which he inserted in the Pastorals, according to his fashion; and from thence they were called Eclogues, or Select Bucolics: we thought fit to use a title more intelligible, the reason of the other being ceased; and we are supported by Virgil's own authority, who expressly calls them carmina pastorum. The French editor is again mistaken, in asserting, that the Ceiris is borrowed from the ninth of Ovid's Metamorphoses: he might have more reasonably conjectured it to be taken from Parthenius, the Greek poet, from whom Ovid borrowed a great part of his work. But it is indeed taken from neither, but from that learned, unfortunate poet, Apollonius Rhodius, to whom Virgil is more indebted than to any other Greek writer, excepting Homer. The reader will be satisfied of this, if he consults that author in his own language; for the translation is a great deal more obscure than the original. Whilst Virgil thus enjoyed the sweets of a learned privacy, the troubles of Italy cut off his little subsistence; but, by a strange turn of human affairs, which ought to keep good men from ever despairing, the loss of his estate proved the effectual way of making his fortune. The occasion of it was this: Octavius, as himself relates, when he was but nineteen years of age, by a masterly stroke of policy, had gained the veteran legions into his service, and, by that step, outwitted all the republican senate. They grew now very clamorous for their pay; the treasury being exhausted, he was forced to make assignments upon land; and none but in Italy itself would content them. He pitched upon Cremona, as the most distant from Rome; but that not sufficing, he afterwards threw in part of the state of Mantua. Cremona was a rich and noble colony, settled a little before the invasion of Hannibal. During that tedious and bloody war, they had done several important services to the commonwealth; and, when eighteen other colonies, pleading poverty and depopulation, refused to contribute money, or to raise recruits, they of Cremona voluntarily paid a double quota of both. But past services are a fruitless plea; civil wars are one continued act of ingratitude. In vain did the miserable mothers, with their famishing infants in their arms, fill the streets with their numbers, and the air with lamentations; the craving legions were to be satisfied at any rate. Virgil, involved in the common calamity, had recourse to his old patron, Pollio; but he was, at this time, under a cloud; however, compassionating so worthy a man, not of a make to struggle through the world, he did what he could, and recommended him to Mæcenas, with whom he still kept a private correspondence. The name of this great man being much better known than one part of his character, the reader, I presume, will not be displeased if I supply it in this place. Though he was of as deep reach, and easy dispatch of business, as any in his time, yet he designedly lived beneath his true character. Men had oftentimes meddled in public affairs, that they might have more ability to furnish for their pleasures: Mæcenas, by the honestest hypocrisy that ever was, pretended to a life of pleasure, that he might render more effectual service to his master. He seemed wholly to amuse himself with the diversions of the town, but, under that mask, was the greatest minister of his age. He would be carried in a careless, effeminate posture through the streets in his chair, even to the degree of a proverb; and yet there was not a cabal of ill-disposed persons which he had not early notice of, and that too in a city as large as London and Paris, and perhaps two or three more of the most populous, put together. No man better understood that art so necessary to the great-the art of declining envy. Being but of a gentleman's family, not patrician, he would not provoke the nobility by accepting invidious honours, but wisely satisfied himself, that he had the ear of Augustus, and the secret of the empire. He seems to have committed but one great fault, which was, the trusting a secret of high consequence to his wife; but his master, enough uxorious himself, made his own frailty more excusable, by generously forgiving that of his favourite: he kept, in all his greatness, exact measures with his friends; and, chusing them wisely, found, by experience, that good sense and gratitude are almost inseparable. This appears in Virgil and Horace. The former, besides the honour he did him to all posterity, retoured his liberalities at his death; the other, whom Mæcenas recommended with his last breath, was too generous to stay behind, and enjoy the favour of Augustus; he only desired a place in his tomb, and to mingle his ashes with those of his deceased benefactor. But this was seventeen hundred years ago. Virgil, thus powerfully supported, thought it * * Walsh might have found an hundred poets of his own time, who would have expressed themselves as warmly as Horace on a similar occasion. Our Dryden, for example: Tell good Barzillai, thou canst sing no more; But neither Horace nor Dryden expected to die a day the sooner for these ardent expressions; and, in extolling the grati * mean to petition for himself alone, but resolutely solicits the cause of his whole country, and seems, at first, to have met with some encouragement; but, the matter cooling, he was forced to sit down contented with the grant of his own estate. He goes therefore to Mantua, produces his warrant to a captain of foot, whom he found in his house. Arius, who had eleven points of the law, and fierce of the services he had rendered to Octavius, was so far from yielding possession, that, words growing betwixt them, he wounded him dangerously, forced him to fly, and at last to swim the river Mincius to save his life. Virgil, who used to say, that no virtue was so necessary as patience, was forced to drag a sick body half the length of Italy, back again to Rome, and by the way, probably, composed his Ninth Pastoral, which may seem to have been made up in haste, out of the fragments of some other pieces; and naturally enough represents the disorder of the poet's mind, by its disjointed fashion, though there be another reason to be given elsewhere of its want of connection. He handsomely states his case in that poem, and, with the pardonable resentments of injured innocence, not only claims Octavius's promise, but hints to him the uncertainty of human greatness and glory. All was taken in good part by that wise prince; at last effectual orders were given. About this time, he composed that admirable poem, which is set first, out of respect to Cæsar; for he does not seem either to have had leisure, or to have been in the humour tude of the ancients at the expence of the moderns, Walsh only gives another instance of the cant which distinguishes his compositions. * An affected Gallicism, for proud of the services. |