Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 354, April 1845

Nor swept her trailing robe the dusty ground.
Instead of these, a tiger's hide o'erspread
Her back and shoulders, fasten'd to her head.
The flying dart she first attempts to fling,
And round her tender temples toss'd the sling;
Then as her strength with years increased, began
To pierce aloft in air the soaring swan,
And from the clouds to fetch the heron and the crane.
The Tuscan matrons with each other vied,
To bless their rival sons with such a bride;
But she disdains their love, to share with me
The sylvan shades, and vow'd virginity.
And oh! I wish, contented with my cares
Of savage spoils, she had not sought the wars.
Then had she been of my celestial train,
And shunn'd the fate that dooms her to be slain.
But since, opposing heaven's decree, she goes
To find her death among forbidden foes,
Haste with these arms, and take thy steepy flight,
Where, with the gods adverse, the Latins fight.
This bow to thee, this quiver, I bequeath,
This chosen arrow, to avenge her death:
By whate'er hand Camilla shall be slain,
Or of the Trojan or Italian train,
Let him not pass unpunish'd from the plain.
Then, in a hollow cloud, myself will aid
To bear the breathless body of my maid:
Unspoil'd shall be her arms, and unprofaned
Her holy limbs with any human hand,
And in a marble tomb laid in her native land."

What is Virgil's in this fair and romantically cast fiction? What hints did the traditionary fable give him? You are not concerned to make an enquiry which you have no means of satisfying. You must hold Camilla to be as much Virgil's as any thing is Homer's in the Iliad. The painting throughout is to the life, and perfectly graceful. The subject was one likely to attach the imagination of a modern poet, and you feel all along, that pleasure inspirits the happy translation of Dryden.

The Destruction of Troy, the Love of Dido, the Descent into Hell, entire Cantos of the poem, take deep and lasting possession of every reader; and, like the first and second books of the Paradise Lost, too much seduce admiration from the remainder of the work. You pick out from the whole Italian war, Lausus, Pallas, Nisus, and Euryalus, and think that you have done with Virgil.

We beg to propose a literary experiment. Homer has left us two poems – a War, and a Wandering. Virgil has bequeathed us one, representing those two, and that proportionally; although in the Latin the Odyssey comes first, and the Iliad follows. For the first six Æneids relate the wandering; whilst the latter six display the war. Let us, therefore, fairly cut the great outrolling, unfolding picture in two, and have two poems, distinct, although closely allied; twins, moulded in one womb, nourished from the same blood. We dare to predict that the poem of "Æneas in Italy," now considered with its own independent interests, and after its own art and management, will duly compete with its rival, "Æneas Fugitive."

How the whole movement, and march, and original conduct of the Italian war will come out! The peaceful entertainment of the Trojans by Latinus, moved with old and new prophecies, and his ready offer of his daughter, Lavinia, to Æneas in marriage – the adverse interposition of Juno – her summoning of Alecto from hell – the glad Fury's fine discharge of her part – her maddening of the Queen Amata, who loves Turnus, hates the strangers, and catches in her own madness all the Latian mothers – the INFURIATING of the young, gallant, ardent, defrauded, princely lover himself – a splendid scene, where the hot warrior's jeers of the fiend in her beldam disguise, sting her Tartarean heart as if it had been a woman's, and for the very wrath she reveals her terrible self – then that exquisite incident, won from the new matter of the poet, from the PASTORAL manners with which he is historically obliged to deal in Italy – the Fury's third and last feat – her drawing-on of Ascanius's hounds to hunt the beautiful favourite stag, which the daughter of the King's chief herdsman petted – and, thence, a quarrel, a skirmish, slaughter begun, and the whole population of the plains aroused. And so with bacchanal women, with Rutulians, and with his own rude liegemen in tumult, the old King overborne – shutting himself up in his palace; and war inflamed in Hesperia, to the full heart's-wish of Jove's imperial wife, who has nothing left her to do more than, descending again from the sky, to push open with her own hands the brazen-gated temple of Janus.

All this is very poetical – is very different from the Iliad, and is perfectly measured to the scale of a war, moved, not by confederated Greece for the overthrow of an Asiatic empire, but by the tribes of the coast for beating back the crews of a few straggling ships from planting a colony, who have nothing on their side but their valour, their fame, and their fates.

Analyze this war; make out for yourself, distinctly, the story, of which in a poem one always too easily loses the sequence, delight and emotion making one less observant; then understand the poetical workings out, in their places and after their bearings; and you will satisfy yourself, that although the cleaving of heads, and the transpiercing of trunks, and the hewing off of limbs, are processes that must always keep up a certain general resemblance to themselves, you have not a campaign imitated from the Iliad; but an original one – proper to person and place.

notes

1

Raphael was born in 1483, Michael Angelo in 1474.

2

"Μὴ μὰν ἀσπουδει γε καὶ ἀκλειῶς ἀπολοίμην
᾽Αλλὰ μέγα ῥέξας τι καὶ ἐσσομενοιοι πυθέσθαι."

    Iliad, XXII. 304.

3

We were about to make some remarks on the alleged production of animated globules in albumen by electricity; but we find that, in a note to the third edition, the author virtually relinquishes this ground. We had made enquiries amongst scientific men; but no such experiment had been received or accredited amongst them.

4

"In tracing the series of fossiliferous formations, from the most ancient to the more modern, the first deposits in which we meet with assemblages of organic remains having a near analogy to the Fauna of certain parts of the globe in our own time, are those commonly called tertiary. Even in the Eocene, or oldest subdivision of these tertiary formations, some few of the testacea belong to existing species, although almost all of them, and apparently all the associated vertebrata, are now extinct. These Eocene strata are succeeded by a great number of modern deposits, which depart gradually in the character of their fossils from the Eocene type, and approach more and more to that of the living creation. In the present state of science, it is chiefly by the aid of shells that we are enabled to arrive at the results; for, of all classes, the testacea are the most generally diffused in a fossil state, and may be called the medals principally employed by nature in recording the chronology of past events. In the Miocene deposits, which succeed next to the Eocene, we begin to find a considerable number, although still a minority, of recent species intermixed with some fossils common to the preceding epoch. We then arrive at the Pliocene strata, in which species now contemporary with man begin to preponderate, and in the newest of which nine-tenths of the fossils agree with species still inhabiting the neighbouring sea.

"In thus passing from the older to the newer members of the tertiary system, we meet with many chasms; but none which separate entirely, and by a broad line of demarcation, one state of the organic world from another. There are no signs of an abrupt termination of one Fauna and Flora, and the starting into life of new and wholly distinct forms. Although we are far from being able to demonstrate geologically an insensible transition from the Eocene to the recent Fauna, yet we may affirm that the more we enlarge and perfect our survey of Europe, the more nearly do we approximate to such a continuous series, and the more gradually are we conducted from times when many of the genera and nearly all the species were extinct, to those in which scarcely a single species flourished which we do not know to exist at present." – Lyell's Principles of Geology. Vol. i. p. 283.

5

This lower jaw is described in another part of the work as showing in the human embryo the last trace of the monkey.

6

Printed at Dublin for Philip Dixon Hardy & Sons, 1842.

7

A place in Ireland?

8

We subjoin the original Etruscan text as read by our author, with its alleged Irish equivalents.

Bucucum: iubiu: pune: ubef: furfath: tref: bitluf: turuf: | marte: thurie: fetu: pupleeper: tutas: hubinas: tutaper: icubina: | batuba: ferine: fetu: puni: fetu: arbic: ustentu: cutep: pes- nimu.

Bu co com iudh be in Pune u be fa for fath tre fa be at lu fa tur u fa | mer ta tur i e fad u prob lu bar to ta is i iudh be i na is to ta bar i co be i na | ba do ba fa ain e fad u Puni fad u ar be iudh us tan do co taib be sni mo.

9

It appears that the Royal Irish Academy had refused to publish these speculations in its Transactions. We are surprised they should have admitted some others of the same stamp, to which reference is made further on.

10

"Now, as Serapio was about to have added something of the same nature, the stranger, taking the words out of his mouth – I am wonderfully pleased, said he, to hear discourses upon such subjects as these; but am constrained to claim your first promise, to tell the reason wherefore now the Pythian prophetess no longer delivers her oracles in poetic numbers and measures. Upon which Theo interposing – It cannot be denied, said he, but that there have been great changes and innovations in reference to poetry and the sciences, yet it is as certain that from all antiquity oracles have been delivered in prose. For we find in Thucydides that the Lacedæmonians, desirous to know the issue of the war then entered into against the Athenians, were answered in prose." * * * "And so of Dinomenes the Sicilian, Procles, tyrant of Epidaurus and Timarchus; and, which is more, the oracular answers, according to which Lycurgus conferred the form of the Lacedæmonian commonwealth, were also so given." —Plutarch. Moral.

11

Death of Wallenstein, Act v. Scene 1, (Coleridge's Translation,) relating to his remembrances of the younger Piccolomini.

12