along with that gift, a larger share of propensities and weaknesses than his fellow-mortals. Therefore it was that they insisted upon that right of domestic privacy which is common to us all. The poet, in his public capacity as an author, held himself responsible for what he wrote; but he had no idea of allowing the whole world to walk into his house, open his desk, read his love-letters, and criticise the state of his finances. Had Varius and Tucca acted on the modern system, the ghost of Virgil would have haunted them on their death-beds. Only think what a legacy might have been ours if these respectable gentlemen had written to Cremona for anecdotes of the poet while at school! No doubt, in some private nook of the old farm-house at Andes, there were treasured up, through the infinite love of the mother, tablets scratched over with verses, composed by young Master Maro at the precocious age of ten. We may, to a certainty, calculate--for maternal fondness always has been the same, and Virgil was an only child--that, in that emporium, themes upon such topics as "Virtus est sola nobilitas" were religiously treasured, along with other memorials of the dear, dear boy who had gone to college at Naples. Modern Varius would remorselessly have printed these: ancient Tucca was more discreet. Then what say you to the college career? Would it not be a nice thing to have all the squibs and feuds, the rows and rackettings of the jovial student preserved to us precisely as they were penned, projected, and perpetrated? Have we not lost a great deal in being defrauded of an account of the manner in which he singed the wig of his drunken old tutor, Parthenius Nicenus, or the scandalously late hours which he kept in company with his especial chums? Then comes the period, darkly hinted at by Donatus, during which he was, somehow or other, connected with the imperial stable; that is, we presume, upon the turf. What would we not give for a sight of Virgil's betting-book! Did he back the field, or did he take the odds on the Emperor's bay mare, Alma Venus Genetrix? How stood he with the legs? What sort of reputation did he maintain in the ring of the Roman Tattersall? Was he ever posted as a defaulter? Tucca! you should have told us this. Then, when sobered down, and in high favour with the court, where is the private correspondence between him and Mæcenas, the President of the Roman Agricultural Society, touching the compilation of the Georgics? The excellent Equestrian, we know, wanted Virgil to construct a poem, such as Thomas Tusser afterwards wrote, under the title of a "_Hondreth Good Points of Husbandrie_," and, doubtless, waxed warm in his letters about draining, manure, and mangel-wurzel. What sacrifice would we not make to place that correspondence in the hands of Henry Stephens! How the author of the _Book of the Farm_ would revel in his exposure of the crude theories of the Minister of the Interior! What a formidable phalanx of facts would he oppose