When Venus opens the eyes of her son Æneas to behold the gods who combated against Troy in that fatal night when it was surprised, we share the pleasure of that glorious vision (which Tasso has not ill copied in the sacking of Jerusalem). But the Greeks had done their business though neither Neptune, Juno, or Pallas had given them their divine assistance. The most crude machine which Virgil uses is in the episode of Camilla, where Opis by the command of her mistress kills Aruns. The next is in the twelfth Æneid, where Venus cures her son Æneas. But in the last of these the poet was driven to a necessity, for Turnus was to be slain that very day; and Æneas, wounded as he was, could not have engaged him in single combat unless his hurt had been miraculously healed and the poet had considered that the dittany which she brought from Crete could not have wrought so speedy an effect without the juice of ambrosia which she mingled with it. After all, that his machine might not seem too violent, we see the hero limping after Turnus; the wound was skinned, but the strength of his thigh was not restored. But what reason had our author to wound Æneas at so critical a time? And how came the cuishes to be worse tempered than the rest of his armour, which was all wrought by Vulcan and his journeymen? These difficulties are not easily to be solved without confessing that Virgil had not life enough to correct his work, though he had reviewed it and found those errors, which he resolved to mend; but being prevented by death, and not willing to leave an imperfect work behind him, he ordained by his last testament that his “Æneis” should be burned. As for the death of Aruns, who was shot by a goddess, the machine was not altogether so outrageous as the wounding Mars and Venus by the sword of Diomede. Two divinities, one would have thought, might have pleaded their prerogative of impassibility, or at least not have been wounded by any mortal hand. Beside that, the ἴχωρ which they shed was so very like our common blood that it was not to be distinguished from it but only by the name and colour. As for what Horace says in his “Art of Poetry,” that no machines are to be used unless on some extraordinary occasion— “_Nec deus intersit_, _nisi dignus vindice nodus_”— that rule is to be applied to the theatre, of which he is then speaking, and means no more than this—that when the knot of the play is to be untied, and no other way is left for making the discovery, then, and not otherwise, let a god descend upon a rope, and clear the business to the audience. But this has no relation to the machines which are used in an epic poem.