The praise involving the recollection of the manners which were—
"Heu pietas! heu prisca fides! invictaque bello
Dextera!"
is given with admirable fervour.
"Mirror of ancient faith, in early youth
Undaunted worth! inviolable truth!"
As for those three words that smote, as the tradition goes, the heart of the too deeply concerned auditress, the bereaved mother herself, to swooning—
"Tu Marcellus eris!"—
they are no doubt, in their overwhelming simplicity, untransferable to our uncouth idiom; and our ears may thank Dryden for the skill with which, by a "New Marcellus," and an otherwise explanatory paraphrase, he has kept the Virgilian music. Meantime the passionate vehemence of the breaking away from that prophecy of intolerable grief—the call for the bestrewment of flowers—
"Manibus date lilia plenis," &c.—
must be weakened, if the moment of the transition is to fall, as we see it in Dryden, at the interval between verse and verse, and not, as we have just seen it with Virgil, at the juncture within the verse of hemistich with hemistich.
"Tu Marcellus eris.—Manibus date lilia plenis," &c.