I sung flocks, tillage, heroes; Mantua gave
Me life, Brundusium death, Naples a grave.
A SHORT
ACCOUNT
OF HIS
PERSON, MANNERS, AND FORTUNE.
He was of a very swarthy complexion, which might proceed from the southern extraction of his father; tall and wide-shouldered, so that he may be thought to have described himself under the character of Musæus, whom he calls the best of poets—
----Medium nam plurima turba
Hunc habet, atque humeris extantem suspicit altis.
His sickliness, studies, and the troubles he met with, turned his hair gray before the usual time. He had a hesitation in his speech, as many other great men; it being rarely found that a very fluent elocution, and depth of judgment, meet in the same person: his aspect and behaviour rustic and ungraceful; and this defect was not likely to be rectified in the place where he first lived, nor afterwards, because the weakness of his stomach would not permit him to use his exercises. He was frequently troubled with the head-ach, and spitting of blood; spare of diet, and hardly drank any wine. Bashful to a fault; and, when people crowded to see him, he would slip into the next shop, or by-passage, to avoid them. As this character could not recommend him to the fair sex, he seems to have as little consideration for them as Euripides himself. There is hardly the character of one good woman to be found in his poems: he uses the word mulier but once in the whole "Æneïs," then too by way of contempt, rendering literally a piece of a verse out of Homer. In his "Pastorals," he is full of invectives against love: in the "Georgics," he appropriates all the rage of it to the females. He makes Dido, who never deserved that character, lustful and revengeful to the utmost degree, so as to die devoting her lover to destruction; so changeable, that the Destinies themselves could not fix the time of her death; but Iris, the emblem of inconstancy, must determine it. Her sister is something worse.[278] He is so far from passing such a compliment upon Helen, as the grave old counsellor in Homer does, after nine years' war, when, upon the sight of her, he breaks out into this rapture, in the presence of king Priam:
None can the cause of these long wars despise;
The cost bears no proportion to the prize:
Majestic charms in every feature shine;
Her air, her port, her accent, is divine.
However, let the fatal beauty go, &c.
Virgil is so far from this complaisant humour, that his hero falls into an unmanly and ill-timed deliberation, whether he should not kill her in a church;[279] which directly contradicts what Deiphobus says of her, Æneid vi., in that place where every body tells the truth. He transfers the dogged silence of Ajax's ghost to that of Dido; though that be no very natural character to an injured lover, or a woman. He brings in the Trojan matrons setting their own fleet on fire, and running afterwards, like witches on their sabbat, into the woods. He bestows indeed some ornaments on the character of Camilla; but soon abates his favour, by calling her aspera and horrenda virgo: he places her in the front of the line for an ill omen of the battle, as one of the ancients has observed. We may observe, on this occasion, it is an art peculiar to Virgil, to intimate the event by some preceding accident. He hardly ever describes the rising of the sun, but with some circumstance which fore-signifies the fortune of the day. For instance, when Æneas leaves Africa and Queen Dido, he thus describes the fatal morning:
Tithoni croceum linquens Aurora cubile.
[And, for the remark, we stand indebted to the curious pencil of Pollio.] The Mourning Fields (Æneid vi.) are crowded with ladies of a lost reputation: hardly one man gets admittance; and that is Cæneus, for a very good reason. Latinus's queen is turbulent and ungovernable, and at last hangs herself: and the fair Lavinia is disobedient to the oracle, and to the king, and looks a little flickering after Turnus. I wonder at this the more, because Livy represents her as an excellent person, and who behaved herself with great wisdom in her regency during the minority of her son; so that the poet has done her wrong, and it reflects on her posterity. His goddesses make as ill a figure: Juno is always in a rage, and the Fury of heaven; Venus grows so unreasonably confident, as to ask her husband to forge arms for her bastard son, which were enough to provoke one of a more phlegmatic temper than Vulcan was. Notwithstanding all this raillery of Virgil's, he was certainly of a very amorous disposition, and has described all that is most delicate in the passion of love: but he conquered his natural inclination by the help of philosophy, and refined it into friendship, to which he was extremely sensible. The reader will admit of or reject the following conjecture, with the free leave of the writer, who will be equally pleased either way. Virgil had too great an opinion of the influence of the heavenly bodies: and, as an ancient writer says, he was born under the sign of Virgo; with which nativity he much pleased himself, and would exemplify her virtues in his life. Perhaps it was thence that he took his name of Virgil and Parthenias, which does not necessarily signify base-born. Donatus and Servius, very good grammarians, give a quite contrary sense of it. He seems to make allusion to this original of his name in that passage,