This description has a manifest reference to Hesiod’s account of the different ages of the world, and forms a complete supplement to that interesting relic of antiquity. Here we trace the _last_, or _Sybilline age_, in which Hesiod wished he had lived, the commencement of a great succession of ages, the return of the virgin _Nemesis_ or _Astræa_, the Goddess of Justice, whom we have denominated _Virtue_, and who fled at the close of the _Iron age_; the return of _Saturn’s_ reign, which was to begin with the _Seventh_, or _Golden age revived_; and the reign of _Apollo_, who was the representative of the _Solar deity_, and the reviver of all things. The humanity and the divinity of the expected prince, is strangely shadowed forth by the poet, in his allusion to his intercourse with _gods_, _demigods_ and _heroes_, according to the Greek mythology. The misapplication, however, of the Cumæan or Sybilline prophecies, which were evidently borrowed or stolen from the Hebrew Scriptures, to the expected son, of _Pollio_ according to some, or of _Augustus_ according to others, is a proof that the time of our Saviour’s advent at the close of the _Sixth age_ was known to be near; and that while there were some who, like aged Simeon, waited for the consolation of Israel; or, like Anna, the prophetess, departed not from the temple at Jerusalem, in earnest expectation of Him who suddenly came to it, and gladdened their eyes; so there were some even among the Heathen who, like Virgil, had heard of the expected Saviour, and who gladly hailed his approach, although they were mistaken as to the signs of his coming, and were ignorant of the distinguishing characteristics by which he was to be known. It can scarcely be doubted indeed, that in this Eclogue, Virgil had the prophecy of Isaiah in his mind, in which the Messiah is described as a “rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a Branch out of his roots,” and which he might have even read in the Greek version of the _Seventy_. The following are some of its more striking points of similarity: “With righteousness he shall judge the poor, and convince the meek of the earth: and he shall smite the earth with the word of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips he shall slay the wicked. The wolf also shall feed with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the young calf, and the bull, and the lion shall feed together; and a little child shall lead them. And the ox and the bear shall feed together; and their young ones shall be together: and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. And an infant shall put his hand on the holes of asps, and on the nest of young asps. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain: for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea;” Isaiah xi. 1–9; taken partly from the Septuagint. In a similar passage of the same prophet, which is perhaps still more to be admired on account of the