Allow me one other word. Virgil--in the vivid lines quoted with admiration by Mr Alison--lauds his beloved Italy for _the absence_ of wild beasts and serpents--and he magnifies the whole race of serpents by his picture of One--the Serpent King--yet with subjects all equal in size to himself in our imagination. The Serpent is _in_ the Poetry, but he is _not in_ Italy. Is this a false artifice of composition--a vain ornament? Oh, no! He describes the Saturnian Land--the mother of corn and of men--bounteous, benign, golden, maternal Italy. The negation has the plenitude of life, which the fabulous absence of noxious reptiles has for the sacred Island of Ierne. BULLER. Erin-go-bragh! SEWARD. Suddenly he sees another vision--not of what is absent but present; and then comes the line arraigned and condemned--followed by lines as great-- "Adde tot egregias urbes, operumque laborem, Tot congesta manu præruptis oppida saxis, Fluminaque antiquos subter labentia muros." The first line grasps in one handful all the mighty, fair, wealthy CITIES of Italy--the second all the rock-cresting _Forts_ of Italy--from the Alpine head to the sea-washed foot of the Peninsula. The collective One Thought of the Human Might and Glory of Italy--as it appears on the countenance of the Land--or visible in its utmost concentration in the girdled Towns and Cities of Men. BULLER. "Adde" then is right, Seward. On that North and you are at one. NORTH. Yes, it is right, and any other word would be wrong. ADDE! Note the sharpness, Buller, of the significance--the vivacity of the short open sound. Fling it out--ring it out--sing it out. Look at the very repetition of the powerful "TOT"--"_tot_ egregias"--"_tot_ congesta"--witnessing by one of the first and commonest rules in the grammar of rhetoric--whether Virgil speaks in prose or in fire. BULLER. In fire. NORTH. Mr Alison then goes on to say, "that the effect of the following nervous and beautiful lines, in the conclusion of the same Book, is _nearly destroyed_ by a similar defect. After these lines, "Hanc olim veteres vitam coluêre Sabini, Hanc Remus et Frater; sic fortis Etruria crevit, Scilicet et rerum facta est pulcherrima Roma;" We little expect the following _spiritless_ conclusion:-- "_Septemque una sibi muro circumdedit arces._" SEWARD. Oh! why does Mr Alison call that line _spiritless_? NORTH. He gives no reason--assured by his own dissatisfaction, that he has but to quote it, and leave it in its own naked impotence. SEWARD. I hope you do not think it spiritless, sir. NORTH.